Programming 101–4. compilers
Disclaimer: the Programming 101 series was originally written to be published as a short book. However, since I never got round to finishing it, I’m publishing the chapters here as individual blog posts…
Running a program
In the previous chapter, we briefly saw that a computer’s CPU is able to
take in a number of bytes and interpret these as instructions and data,
but we have yet to explain how this actually works. “How does a computer
execute a program?” How is it possible that we can feed a machine
written instructions and that it, in turn, performs actions?
There are two sides to this question.
The matter of what happens in the CPU with machine code is not for this
book. I think it is enough to reiterate that, simply stated, the binary
form of the code causes differences of voltage, which then trigger
certain actions through the CPUs electronic circuitry.
Low-level versus high-level languages
The other aspect is the story of the code itself. Up to this point, wehave only really discussed “machine code”, but this is not what computer programmer’s write…
