A Brief Overview of Programming Languages
A modern digital computer is only capable of working with binary information, zeros and ones. To help humans control computers more easily, computer scientists developed programming languages. These languages appear to humans in a more understandable format than simple zeros and ones.
As computer science developed, many languages were created to satisfy a variety of needs. But these languages can generally be broken down into two categories: compiled and interpreted.
Compiled programs are created from text files called source files. A special program called a compiler translates the text based source files into binary files that the computer can execute directly on the CPU. This process only happens once to produce a binary file. After that occurs, the computer user only needs the binary file to run the program.
This results in a faster program than the interpreted method, but the programs can only be run on a computer built with the CPU that the program was compiled to run on.
To see a flash example of the compiling process, click here.
Some examples of compiled programming languages include:
Interpreted programs are also created as text files. When one of these programs is executed, a second program called an interpreter starts. The interpreter reads the text source file and executes each line as it is read. This process occurs every time that program is executed.
This typically results in a much slower program compared to a compiled program, but we gain the ability to run the program on multiple computer systems, no matter what style of CPU we have.
To see a flash example of the interpreted program process, click here.
Some examples of interpreted programming languages include:
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