Compilers and Compiled Languages

Compilers and Compiled Languages

NOTE: This article is meant to be a subordinate of a main article, https://steemit.com/technology/@inputoutput/beginning-programming-with-android-c-c-php-python-java-and-javascript. If you haven't read the main article, you should consider reading it. However, if you do not wish to, you can continue with this.

As you begin to get more involved in the programming world, you will come across these two terms which are vital to understand, compiler and compiled language. In this article, I will explain these two terms as simple as possible.

A computer, be it a desktop computer, laptop, smart phone, etc, is a programmable electronic device. We can give it instruction which it carries out.

A computer does not understand typical human languages. Computers understand a gibberish language of 0s and 1s. An instruction written in a native computer language may look like this: 00001101 11011100 10010010. While this looks bizarre to you, it's what a computer takes and executes diligently.

As you can imagine, if humans are to communicate with computers like this, writing computer programs will never be easy. At your stage, the ease may be the only difficulty you may notice about this, but there are many other serious problems with it.

To overcome the problems of having to write programs in gibberish computer languages, computer scientists started developing new programming languages.

These programming languages were developed to solve the problems being faced with native computer languages. These programming languages among other things, were designed to be more comprehensible by the human brain.

However, because these programming languages bear high abstraction from native computer languages, they are called high level languages (HLL).

For some high level languages, programs written in them are translated to native computer language. Softwares that translate high level languages to machine language (ML), are known as compilers. Furthermore, any high level language that is translated to machine language is known as a compiled language.

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