1. Introduction

An instruction running inside a CPU is in the form of binary numbers.

However, people tend to find writing instructions as pure binary numbers impossible. Thus, more people-friendly computer languages have been developed to enable them to write programs using syntax they can understand.

In this section we will not be discussing individual languages, but rather the different types of languages used in programming, and how we translate human-written source code into computer-readable binary.

The types of language we will be covering are:

• Machine code
• Low-level language (Assembly code)
• High-level language (Source code)

As well as the tools used to write and convert them. These are called translators, and there are three types:

• Assemblers
• Compilers
• Interpreters