programming languages
- 1. 3.2 Programming languages For programming computers, we want simple, unambiguous, regular, and economical languages with powerful means of abstraction. A programming language is a language that is designed to be read and written by humans to create programs that can be executed by computers. Programming languages come in many flavors. It is difficult to simultaneously satisfy all desired properties since simplicity is often at odds with economy. Every feature that is added to a language to increase its expressiveness incurs a cost in reducing simplicity and regularity. For the first two parts of this book, we use the Scheme programming language which was designed primarily for simplicity. Another reason there are many different programming languages is that they are at different levels of abstractionabstraction. Some languages provide programmers with detailed control over machine resources, such as selecting a particular location in memory where a value is stored. Other languages hide most of the details of the machine operation from the programmer, allowing them to focus on higher-level actions.
- 2. Ultimately, we want a program the computer can execute. This means at the lowest level we need languages the computer can understand directly. At this level, the program is just a sequence of bits encoding machine instructions. Code at this level is not easy for humans to understand or write, but it is easy for a processor to execute quickly. The machine code encodes instructions that direct the processor to take simple actions like moving data from one place to another, performing simple arithmetic, and jumping around to find the next instruction to execute.machine code For example, the bit sequence 1110101111111110 encodes an instruction in the Intel x86 instruction set (used on most PCs) that instructs the processor to jump backwards two locations. Since the instruction itself requires two locations of space, jumping back two locations actually jumps back to the beginning of this instruction. Hence, the processor gets stuck running forever without making any progress. A compiler is a computer program that generates other programs. It translates an input program written in a high-level language that is easier for humans to create into a program in a machine-level language that can be executed by the computer. Admiral Grace Hopper developed the first compilers in the 1950s. An alternative to a compiler is an interpreter. An interpreter is a tool that translates between a higher-level language and a lower-level language, but where a compiler translates an entire program at once and produces a machine language program that can be executed directly, an interpreter interprets the program a small piece at a time while it is running.
- 3. Nobody believed that I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic. One disadvantage of using an interpreter instead of a compiler is that because the translation is happening while the program is running, the program executes slower than a compiled program. Another advantage of compilers over interpreters is that since the compiler translates the entire program it can also analyze the program for consistency and detect certain types of programming mistakes automatically instead of encountering them when the program is running (or worse, not detecting them at all and producing unintended results). This is especially important when writing critical programs such as flight control software — we want to detect as many problems as possible in the flight control software before the plane is flying! Since we are more concerned with interactive exploration than with performance and detecting errors early, we use an interpreter instead of a compiler.