What Is a ’High-Level’ Language?
A computer language is a way of representing a program that can be translated into something that a computer can execute. A language is described as low-level if it’s close to instructions executed by the hardware. The lowest-level language that can be used is raw machine code—a string of numbers representing instructions and operands understood by the CPU. Note that in most modern microprocessors this is still one layer of abstraction away from the “real” instructions. A modern x86 CPU, for example, will split each of these instructions into a series of micro-operations (μOps) and then execute the μOps individually. The next layer up is assembly languages, which are semantically equivalent to the raw machine code; one assembly language statement translates directly to one machine instruction. Assembly languages are slightly easier to read than machine code, because they substitute mnemonics for numbers. They often have some syntactic sugar, such as the ability to define macros—code se
