A programming language is a formal language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs to control the behavior of a machine or to express algorithms. Some authors use the term “programming language” as synonymous with “computer language”. and “computer languages” can be thought of as existing on
Computer languages are used to create computer programs. A computer program is a set of instructions that performs a particular task when executed by a computer. Computer programs have been around since the 1940s but became popular in the 1970s when personal computers were developed, although their use has been gaining popularity throughout much of recent history. Computer programs and the creation of them are typically based on a programming language. A programming language is a formal language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs to control the behavior of a machine or to express algorithms. Some authors use the term “programming language” as synonymous with “computer language”. and “computer languages” can be thought of as existing on a continuum from low-level languages, which are more closely associated with the details of the machine architecture, to high-level languages that are more abstract.
Computer programs are far more instructive than natural human languages, human languages being imprecise for this purpose. For example, a traditional high-level programming language might have some abstract datatype called “Array of 3 elements” with the description “A list of Numbers”. A programmer would be told to expect that an array was represented in memory by three consecutive bytes forming a contiguous block of memory that held the contents of the array. By contrast, some low-level languages define a “pointer to an array of 3 elements” in terms of how it would be represented in memory. In the same way that words have contextual meanings, so do computer programs. The meaning comes from being able to execute them correctly and efficiently given the underlying hardware architecture.
Therefore, programmers need a language that is detailed enough to allow them to write computer programs that can accomplish the desired result, but general enough to eliminate unnecessary details so as not to limit the ways in which a program can be written.
programmer must learn many details about how computers store and manipulate data, just as someone learning a natural language must learn many details of how human beings use words”. However, this analogy is flawed because the underlying structure of language is very different from that of computers. Natural languages are fundamentally digital whereas computer languages are fundamentally analog. For example, most programming languages have a boolean datatype with values true and false, but there may be no direct
A programming language is a formal language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs to control the behavior of a machine or to express algorithms. Some authors use the term ‘programming language’ as synonymous with ‘computer language’. and ‘computer languages’ can be thought of as existing on their own and not requiring the machine (i.e. the programmer writes in some high-level language and the compiler of the language converts it to machine code).
Some of the most common programming languages are C++, Java, HTML, Python, PHP, and Lisp. These languages can do more than just create programs. They can also be used for web development (PHP) or building computer games (Lisp).
On the other hand, there are low-level programming languages like Assembly. These languages typically do not transfer well to different machines because they require compiler changes for the different underlying hardware.
A high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. In comparison to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language elements, be easier to use, or may automate (or even hide entirely) significant areas of computing systems (e.g., memory management), making the process of developing a program simpler and more understandable relative to a lower-level language.
conclusion
Programming languages can be used to create programs to control the behavior of a machine or express algorithms. Computer languages are special-purpose but often resemble natural languages. Like natural languages, most computer languages consist of words (which may or may not correspond directly to English words) that are assembled into sentences that express statements.
Computer languages differ from natural languages in that natural languages are only used for communication between people, whereas computer languages also allow humans to communicate instructions to machines; and because natural language sentences vary in structure and length, while most computer language sentences contain exactly one statement (and its parameter list) per line.
To write programs in a programming language, you need to know the grammar that relates these strings of symbols to the execution of the program. Many programming languages have an official or standard defining the grammar and syntax, which is usually called “the” syntax of the language.