Programming languages are one of two types of system software. It is similar to the languages that you and I are most familiar with- English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, etc. Just like we speak English, or Spanish, or French, computers, too, speak a language. The languages that computers speak are called programming languages.
These are the languages that programs and applications are written in so that they can be understood and carried out by the computer. Just like the natural languages that we, as humans, speak, programming languages also have grammar, vocabularies, and syntax. The major difference between natural languages and programming languages is that natural languages are ambiguous. They can be interpreted in different ways, and often have different rules. Anyway, a computer's programming language must be very specific. The rules that they have for grammar and spelling must be very precise. This is obviously not the case with natural languages. With English, for example, there are tons of rules, like "I before E except after C." But then, there are tons of exceptions to these rules- like the word "weird," for example. E comes before I, and there's no C.
There are two types of programming languages:
1. Machine Languages
They are usually written as a series of 1s and 0s-the digits in the binary system. Machine languages can be used to tell computers what computations to perform, where the data needed to carry out a certain instruction is contained in the memory, where in the memory to store the results of an operation, as well as what operation to perform next!
2. High-level Programming Languages
High-level programming languages are often used to write up very complex programs and applications. After all, it is much easier written programs in human-like languages rather than as a strand of 1s and 0s! It is also much quicker to write applications in high-level languages.
Some examples of high-level languages that will be talked about are:
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