Low Level Languages

Low Level Languages

The term low level means closeness to the way in which the machine has been built. Low level languages are machine oriented and require extensive knowledge of computer hardware and its configuration.Low level language is further divided into -

a. Machine Language.
b. Assembly Language.

(a) Machine Language :
Machine Language is the only language that is directly understood by the computer. It does not needs any translator program. We also call it machine code and it is written as strings of 1's (one) and 0’s (zero). When this sequence of codes is fed to the computer, it recognizes the codes and converts it in to electrical signals needed to run it. For example, a program instruction may look like this:

1011000111101

It is not an easy language for you to learn because of its difficult to understand. It is efficient for the computer but very inefficient for programmers. It is considered to the first generation language. It is also difficult to debug the program written in this language.

Advantage Machine Language:
The only advantage is that program of machine language run very fast because no translation program is required for the CPU.

Disadvantages Machine Language:
1. It is very difficult to program in machine language. The programmer has to know details of hardware to write program.
2. The programmer has to remember a lot of codes to write a program which results in program errors.
3. It is difficult to debug the program.



(b) Assembly Language :
It is the first step to improve the programming structure. You should know that computer can handle numbers and letter. Therefore some combination of letters can be used to substitute for number of machine codes.
The set of symbols and letters forms the Assembly Language and a translator program is required to translate the Assembly Language to machine language. This translator program is called `Assembler'. It is considered to be a second-generation language.

Advantages Assembly Language:
1.The symbolic programming of Assembly Language is easier to understand and saves a lot of time and effort of the programmer.
2.It is easier to correct errors and modify program instructions.
3.Assembly Language has the same efficiency of execution as the machine level language. Because this is one-to-one translator between assembly language program and its corresponding machine language program.

Disadvantages Assembly Language:
1.One of the major disadvantages is that assembly language is machine dependent. A program written for one computer might not run in other computers with different hardware configuration.