Computer Languages: compiled, interpreted, and assembled.

Sat, 26 May 2018 04:52:53 GMT

A few months ago while waiting for a ferry with my sister I mentioned a programming language called Elm, which I've been particularly interested in because it's a functional language that compiles into Javascript. Her response, predictably, was something like "I have no idea what you just said. What does 'compiles' mean?" So I explained the difference between compilers and interpreters, and a few other things about programming languages, and she said that it was the first time anyone had explained how programming languages work in a way that made sense to her. In the back of my mind, I thought it might someday make an interesting blog post. So here it is.

Inside of a computer, everything is a number. These days, these numbers are all represented in binary (base two -- just ones and zeroes), stored in a couple of billion numbered locations each of which holds eight binary digits. (A binary digit is called a "bit", and eight of them together make a "byte", which is the amount of data needed to represent a number between 0 and 255, or a single character in a block of text. Apart from the numerical coincidence, computer bits have nothing to do with the bits that were made by breaking apart "pieces of eight".)

The numbers in the computer's memory are used for three different things. First, some of them are used to represent the data that the computer is going to be working on. Second, some of them represent the location of those data. And finally, some of them are instructions that tell the computer what to do with the data. Those instructions are called "machine language" because they're the only thing the machine actually understands. Nobody writes programs in machine language if they can possibly avoid it.

( the details )

TL;DR: an assembler turns each line in a program directly into a machine-language instruction. A compiler takes a program written in a more complicated (for the computer) but easier to write in (for people) and turns it into a sequence of machine-language instructions, that can then be read back in and run. An interpreter skips that last step -- instead of writing out the machine language instructions, it just does them on the spot.

Teaser: Next time I'll talk about different kinds of programming languages: functional, imperative, object-oriented, and scripting. I'm also open to suggestions -- what would you like me to write about?

comments

The Mandelbear's Musings

Computer Languages: compiled, interpreted, and assembled.