Week 3 - Session 2. Programming Language: Machine, Assembly, High-Level Language

Purpose; Today our main objectives are to find out more further information about what is program, programming language, programming and who is programmer.

Programming language is a set of words, numbers, symbols which permits programmer who uses computer to communicate instructions to a computer and it serves as a tool to write or create programs. Moreover, It is a unique language to connect programmer and computer

Types or PL

There are main two types of computer languages
1. Low-level language
2. High-level Language

In turn, Low-level language shows following characteristics namely, they are machine dependent language, tedious and time-consuming and each instruction represents a single machine instruction
The next one High-level language is machine in dependent language, more user friendly and every instruction can indicate different and several machine instructions.

1.Low- level language has two types Machine (the first generation) Language and Assembly language (the second generation)


2.High-level languages -s more powerful than assembly language, allows user to work more English-like Environment and it includes 3 kinds as following, namely the third, fourth and fifth generation languages




Generations of programming languages

The first and second generations: We start out with the first and second generation languages during the period of 1950-60, which to many experienced programmers will say are machine and assembly languages. Programming language history really began with the work of Charles Babbage in the early nineteenth century who developed automated calculation for mathematical functions. Further developments in early 1950 brought us machine language without interpreters and compilers to translate languages. Micro-code is an example of the first generation language residing in the CPU written for doing multiplication or division. The second generation of programming language like AUTOCODER, SAP and SPS

The third-generation: Throughout the early 1960's till 1980 saw the emergence of the third generation programming languages. Languages like ALGOL 58, 60 and 68, COBOL, FORTRAN IV, ADA and C are examples of this and were considered as high level languages. Most of this languages had compilers and the advantage of this was speed. Independence was another factor as these languages were machine independent and could run on different machines. The advantages of high level languages include the support for ideas of abstraction so that programmers can concentrate on finding the solution to the problem rapidly, rather than on low-level details of data representation

 

The Fourth generation: Features evident in fourth generation languages quite clearly are that it must be user friendly, portable and independent of operating systems, usable by non-programmers,  which was not possible using COBOL or PL/I. Standardisation however, in early stages of evolution can inhibit creativity in developing powerful languages for the future. Examples of this generation of languages are IBM's ADRS2, APL, CSP and AS, Power Builder, Access.

The fifth generation: The 1990's saw the developments of fifth generation languages like PROLOG. This means computers can in the future have the ability to think for themselves and draw their own inferences using programmed information in large databases. Complex processes like understanding speech would appear to be trivial using these fast inferences and would make the software seem highly intelligent