Computer language has gone through a process of development from machine language, assembly language to high-level language, which is divided into four main categories: low-level language, high-level language, specialized language and scripting language. This is also the process from simple to difficult:
1, machine language
Machine language refers to a computer's entire set of instructions
Electronic computers are used by the "0" and "1" composed of binary numbers, binary is the basis of the language of the computer. At the beginning of the invention of the computer, people can only condescend to use the language of the computer to order the computer to do this and that, in a word, is to write a string of "0" and "1" composed of sequences of instructions to the computer to perform, the computer can recognize the language, that is, the machine language. The use of machine language is very painful, especially when the program is wrong and needs to be modified.
2. Assembly language
In order to alleviate the pain of programming in machine language, a useful improvement has been made: to replace the binary string of a particular instruction with a concise string of letters and symbols, such as "ADD" for addition, "MOV" for data transfer, etc. In this way, it is very easy for people to read and understand what the program is doing. Error correction and maintenance have become convenient, this programming language is called assembly language, that is, the second generation of computer language. However, computers do not recognize these symbols, which requires a special program that is specifically responsible for translating these symbols into the machine language of binary numbers, and this translation program is called an assembler.
3. High-level languages
From the initial painful experience of communicating with computers, people realized that they should design a language that was close to the language of mathematics or the natural language of human beings, while at the same time being independent of computer hardware, and compiling programs that would be common to all machines. After efforts, in 1954, the first completely separate from the machine hardware of the high-level language - FORTRAN came out, more than 50 years, *** there are hundreds of high-level language appeared, there are dozens of important, more influential, more commonly used FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, BASIC, LISP, SNOBOL, PL/1, Pascal, C, PROLOG, Ada, C++, VC, VB, JAVA and so on.