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What are high-level languages?
Computers are machines (often referred to as hardware). They do not understand anything more than 0s and 1s. These are referred to as bits. A group of eight bits together forms a byte. Bits and bytes are the only things that a computer can understand in reality. This is also referred to as the machine language or low-level language. However, it is immensely difficult for human beings to write and understand this language in 0s and 1s. To overcome this difficulty, computer scientists created a set of instructions that can be understood by computers that are written in a series of words that human beings can easily understand. These languages are called high-level languages in computers. Examples of high-level languages in computers are Python, Visual Basic, PHP, HTML, and others – a majority of these languages that we see today around us.
The fundamental difference between machine language and high-level computer languages is that machine language programming requires humans to understand how a computer works and write a program accordingly. However, in the case of high-level computer languages, the programs that are written are computer independent.
High-level computer language Advantage
The main advantage of high-level languages in computers is that they are easy to read and understand even by human beings. This makes the programs written in high-level languages easy to change and maintain when there are changes that are required in the programs. The high-level languages came to be first created around the middle of the previous century (around the 1950s).
Comparing Languages
The low-level languages, since they are written directly in the language that the computers can understand are much faster in execution and have relatively better control on the resources of a computer like its memory, hard disk among other things. However, machine language cannot be used to create web pages or any of the other modern applications that we see like Microsoft Office (MS Office is also a program, but an extraordinarily complex one!).
In comparison to this, computer high-level programming languages are easy to read and understand. The programming is very efficient (it is easy for the programmer to write easily and quickly). The programmers need not be worried about how exactly the computer hardware will work when their program runs. Sometimes, wrong commands when they are given in machine language can spoil the computer – the risk of which is not there in high-level language programs. However, there is a special program called the compiler that is required when programmers write programs in high-level languages. The compilers translate the high-level language in computers into a language that the machines understand.
Major differences between computer languages high-level and low-level
Low-level languages | High-level languages |
Very machine friendly | Programmer friendly |
Immensely fast | Relatively slow |
Highly efficient | Not so efficient |
Difficult to correct mistakes in programs* | Quite easy to correct any mistakes in the programs* |
Programs that are written in these cannot be shifted across computers | Programs written in high-level languages are easy to shift between computers |
Difficult to maintain | Quite easy to maintain |
Do not need any other program for the computer to understand the programs written in these languages | Need compilers and interpreters to convert high-level languages to machine-understandable format. |
Not very widely used | Very commonly used |
* – the mistakes in the programs are called “bugs.”
Conclusion
Computer High-level programming languages are those that were created in the middle of the 20th century (the 1950s). These languages use very English-like language to write the programs. The programs written in a high-level language are easy to read and understand, which makes them easy to maintain, unlike the programs that are written in low-level languages. Programs written in high-level languages need compilers and interpreters to convert them into a format that can be understood by computers. The programs written in high-level languages in computers can be easily used across different computers.
