High-level programming language is a type of programming language that allows the programmer to write programs (algorithms) that are more or less independent of a particular type of computer (hardware). These languages are considered high-level languages because they are closer to human natural language and farther from machine language. In other words, they use a strong abstraction of the details of the computer.
In English: high-level programming language.
Introduction to high-level programming languages
In contrast, assembly languages (low-level languages) are considered low-level languages because they are very close to the language used by machines.
The main advantage of high-level languages over low-level languages is that they are easier for humans to read, write, and maintain. Ultimately, high-level programs must be translated into a specific machine language using a compiler or interpreter. This way they can be executed by a specific machine.
The first high-level programming language designed for computers was Plankalkl (1948), created by Konrad Zuse (1910-1995). In any case, it was not implemented at the time.
While the first widely distributed high-level programming language was Fortran, an IBM development that first appeared in 1957. While the Algol language, defined in 1958 and 1960, introduced new concepts such as recursion, nested functions, many programming concepts. structured programming, etc. At that time Cobol also introduced registers and Lisp introduced lambda abstraction.
Source code in a high-level language
Advantages and disadvantages of high-level programming languages
Advantage
– Result in source code that is easier for humans to read, write, and maintain. In general, it allows you to use fewer lines of code compared to machine language.
– They allow to write a valid code executable in different types of machines and operating systems.
– They use programming paradigms.
Disadvantages
– They are slower to execute, being the most efficient machine code. This depends on the design of the compiler for high-level languages anyway: a good design produces more efficiency.
– In some cases the resulting program requires a certain platform to run.
Execution modes of high-level programming languages
There are three execution modes for these languages:
– Interpreted: when a code in a language is interpreted, its syntax is read and then executed directly, without a compilation phase. A program called an interpreter reads each statement in the program, following the program flow, and decides what to do and does it. Interpreters are the simplest form of language behavior implementation, compared to the other two variants listed here.
– Compiled: when code in a language is compiled, its syntax is first converted to executable form before it is run. There are two types of compilation: machine code generation (compiler that passes source code directly to machine code) and intermediate rendering (a rendering is compiled that can be optimized or saved for later execution without the need to reread the source code. saved representation may be in the form of bytecode).
– Source-to-Source Translated or Trans-compiling: Code written in one language can be translated into terms of programming languages for which native code compilers are already widely available. JavaScript and C languages are common for these translations. For example, CoffeeScript, Chicken Scheme, and Eiffel.
Examples of high-level programming languages
The first high-level programming languages were designed in the 1950s. Currently there are hundreds of languages of this type, such as:
– Ada
– Algol
– BASIC
– COBOL
– C (some consider it mid-level)
– C++ (some consider it mid-level)
-Delphi
– FORTRAN
– Java
-LISP
– Modulate-2
– Pascal
– Pearl
-php
– Prolog
-Python
-Visual Basic .NET
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