Language Skills
Doghouse – High-Level Languages
With all the benefits of high-level languages, there's still good value in learning assembly- and machine-level languages today.
Last month I talked about low-level assembly and machine languages and the fact that assembly was a mnemonic representation of the ones and zeros of machine language. This month I will discuss what a high-level language is, why they were invented, and why people should still learn some machine/assembly level language.
Machine/assembly-level languages (hereafter just called "machine language") were very slow and tedious to program. You typically had to code a lot of statements even to do the simplest things. Even simple statements like A=B+C in a high-level language might take 10 or 15 machine-language statements, and they were prone to mistakes on issues such as register overflow – which might need instructions to test for and correct overflow and which the machine-language programmer might forget to code.
The people who foresaw high-level languages said that they believed computers could be programmed in a "natural language." Given the computers of those days, you might understand there were people who thought this was impossible.
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