Lesson 3.5

3.5 WHAT IS LANGUAGE?

You are aware with the term language. It is a system of communication between you and me. Some of the basic natural languages that we are familiar with are English, Hindi, Oriya etc. These are the languages used to communicate among various categories of persons. But how you will communicate with your computer. Your computer will not understand any of these natural languages for transfer of data and instruction. So there are programming languages specially developed so that you could pass your data and instructions to the computer to do specific job. You must have heard names like FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL etc. These are programming languages. So instructions or programs are written in a particular language based on the type of job. As an example, for scientific application FORTRAN and C languages are used. On the other hand COBOL is used for business applications.

3.5.1  Programming Languages

There are two major types of programming languages. These are Low Level Languages and High Level Languages. Low Level languages are further divided in to Machine language and Assembly language.

3.5.2 Low Level Languages

The term low level means closeness to the way in which the machine has been built. Low level languages are machine oriented and require extensive knowledge of computer hardware and its configuration.

(a) Machine Language

 Machine Language is the only language that is directly understood by the computer. It does not needs any translator program. We also call it machine code and it is written as strings of 1's (one) and 0’s (zero). When this sequence of codes is fed to the computer, it recognizes the codes and converts it in to electrical signals needed to run it. For example, a program instruction may look like this:

                          1011000111101

It is not an easy language for you to learn because of its difficult to understand. It is efficient for the computer but very inefficient for programmers. It is considered to the first generation language. It is also difficult to debug the program written in this language.

Advantage

 The only advantage is that program of machine language run very fast because no translation program is required for the CPU.

Disadvantages

1. It is very difficult to program in machine language. The programmer has to know details of hardware to write program.

2. The programmer has to remember a lot of codes to write a program which results in program errors.

3.   It is difficult to debug the program.

 (b) Assembly Language

It is the first step to improve the programming structure. You should know that computer can handle numbers and letter. Therefore some combination of letters can be used to substitute for number of machine codes.

The set of symbols and letters forms the Assembly Language and a translator program is required to translate the Assembly Language to machine language. This translator program is called `Assembler'. It is considered to be a second-generation language.

Advantages:

1. The symbolic programming of Assembly Language is easier to understand and saves a lot of time and effort of the programmer.

2.  It is easier to correct errors and modify program instructions.

3.  Assembly Language has the same efficiency of execution as the machine level language. Because this is one-to-one translator between assembly language program and its corresponding machine language program.

Disadvantages:

1. One of the major disadvantages is that assembly language is machine dependent. A program written for one computer might not run in other computers with different hardware configuration.

IN-TEXT QUESTIONS 2

1.  What is the difference between FORTRAN and COBOL?

2.  Differentiate between machine language and Assembly language.

3.  Write True or False

   (a) Low level language and High level language are two major types of programming languages.

   (b) Machine language is the only language that is indirectly understood by the computer.

   (c) Assembly language is second generation language.