High Level Lang

high-level language a programming language such as c, fortran, or pascal that enables a programmer to write programs that are more or less independent of a particular type of computer. such languages are considered high-level because they are closer to human languages and further from machine languages. in contrast, assembly languages are considered lowlevel because they are very close to machine languages. the main advantage of high-level languages over low-level languages is that they are easier to read, write, and maintain. ultimately, programs written in a high-level language must be translated into machine language by a compiler or interpreter. the first high-level programming languages were designed in the 1950s. now there are dozens of different languages, including ada, algol, basic, cobol, c, c++, fortran, lisp, pascal, and prolog.

program an organized list of instructions that, when executed, causes the computer to behave in a predetermined manner. without programs, computers are useless. a program is like a recipe. it contains a list of ingredients (called variables) and a list of directions (called statements) that tell the computer what to do with the variables. the variables can represent numeric data, text, or graphical images. there are many programming languages -- c, c++, pascal, basic, fortran, cobol, and lisp are just a few. these are all high-level languages. one can also write programs in low-level languages called assembly languages, although this is more difficult. low-level languages are closer to the language used by a computer, while high-level languages are closer to human languages. eventually, every program must be translated into a machine language that the computer can understand. this translation is performed by compilers, interpreters, and assemblers. when you buy software, you normally buy an executable version of a program. this means that the program is already in machine language -- it has already been compiled and assembled and is ready to execute.