Why do we use programming languages?

Answer 1

A computer can carry out millions, even billions, of operations every second. Thus, it can do things much faster - and usually much more accurately - than a human. To tell the computer what to do, you write instructions in a special language, called a "programming language".

To be accurate, internally the computer uses very specific instructions, the so-called "machine language". Since programming in machine language is awkward, programmers program in higher-level languages, that are easier to understand for humans - such as Assembly language, Java, C, Pascal, etc. Then, a special program called a "compiler" then converts this to instructions the computer can understand.

A computer can carry out millions, even billions, of operations every second. Thus, it can do things much faster - and usually much more accurately - than a human. To tell the computer what to do, you write instructions in a special language, called a "programming language".

To be accurate, internally the computer uses very specific instructions, the so-called "machine language". Since programming in machine language is awkward, programmers program in higher-level languages, that are easier to understand for humans - such as Assembly language, Java, C, Pascal, etc. Then, a special program called a "compiler" then converts this to instructions the computer can understand.

A computer can carry out millions, even billions, of operations every second. Thus, it can do things much faster - and usually much more accurately - than a human. To tell the computer what to do, you write instructions in a special language, called a "programming language".

To be accurate, internally the computer uses very specific instructions, the so-called "machine language". Since programming in machine language is awkward, programmers program in higher-level languages, that are easier to understand for humans - such as Assembly language, Java, C, Pascal, etc. Then, a special program called a "compiler" then converts this to instructions the computer can understand.

A computer can carry out millions, even billions, of operations every second. Thus, it can do things much faster - and usually much more accurately - than a human. To tell the computer what to do, you write instructions in a special language, called a "programming language".

To be accurate, internally the computer uses very specific instructions, the so-called "machine language". Since programming in machine language is awkward, programmers program in higher-level languages, that are easier to understand for humans - such as Assembly language, Java, C, Pascal, etc. Then, a special program called a "compiler" then converts this to instructions the computer can understand.

Answer 2

We use programming languages to create machine code programs. Programming languages are typically high-level, highly abstract languages that are easy for humans to read and maintain but impossible for a computer to understand. As such, the high-level source code must be converted to low-level machine code, the native language of the machine. This is achieved by another machine code program known as a compiler.

High-level languages can also be interpreted, which simply means the source code is translated into machine code and executed one statement at a time. Programming languages such as Java are both compiled and interpreted. That is; the high-level source code is compiled to an intermediate language known as byte code which can then be interpreted (by the Java virtual machine) much more easily and more quickly than the original source could. The advantage of this is that the compiled byte code is portable; it can be executed on any machine with a suitable interpreter. Compiled machine code is not portable (the machine code must be compiled separately for each supported platform) however, compiled machine code executes much more quickly and more efficiently than interpreted byte code because there is no need for further translation.

Answer 3

A computer can carry out millions, even billions, of operations every second. Thus, it can do things much faster - and usually much more accurately - than a human. To tell the computer what to do, you write instructions in a special language, called a "programming language".

To be accurate, internally the computer uses very specific instructions, the so-called "machine language". Since programming in machine language is awkward, programmers program in higher-level languages, that are easier to understand for humans - such as Assembly language, Java, C, Pascal, etc. Then, a special program called a "compiler" then converts this to instructions the computer can understand.