Programming Languages Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Programming Languages - Essay Example Whereas, the other authors have categorized the computer languages keeping in view the different aspects of the computer language including programming paradigm. The categories include: the procedural programming languages, structured programming languages, object oriented programming languages, functional programming languages, event driven programming, compiled and interpreted computer programming languages (Hurst, n.d). The computer languages are based on the syntax and semantic rules. It is pertinent to compare the programming languages based on the categories of the languages as well as predefined comparison criteria should be used. The paper focuses on three (3) main categories of the computer programming languages and presents an introduction to the programming languages, types of the programming languages, comparison of the programming languages, design and implementation phases of the programming languages and a conclusion based on critical analysis of the programming langua ges. Computer Programming languages Classification Computer programming languages have been developed to solve the human problems effectively and efficiently. Different categories of the programming languages accept, translate, and execute the instructions in diverse manners. Consider the ‘high level languages’, the programmers / coders write code in a more human understandable language as per the predefined syntax of the selected programming language platform. In other words, the ‘high level languages’ are developed so that the human beings can easily understand and use them. It is pertinent to mention here that there are three (3) models for execution of the ‘high level languages’ include: interpretation, compilation and translation. The interpretation refers to the execution of code without its compilation and requires an interpreter to interpret the code into machine language. The compilation refers to the translation of the code into execu table form by using either machine code generation technique or intermediate representation technique. Keeping in view the above facts, it is scrutinized that the ‘high level languages’ can further be classified based on the execution models they adopt to execute the program / code. Furthermore, it can be stated that the ‘high level languages’ are slow as compared to the assembly and machine languages. The high level programming languages include: C, C++, FORTRAN, Java, etc. The assembly languages are low level computer programming languages which directly correspond to the computer architecture. The assembly languages are computer architecture dependent in contrast to the ‘high level languages’ which can be ported across multiple different systems. The computer does not understand the assembly language; therefore, the programs created in the assembly languages require assemblers to convert the code into executable machine code. In Assembly lan guage the programmers use the symbolic computer addresses which are converted into the absolute addresses by the assembler. As compared to the ‘high level languages’, the assembly languages are difficult to understand and learn by human beings. The examples of the assembly language include: the AUTOCODER (usable for IBM mainframe systems), FASM (Flat Assembler), MASM (Microsoft Macro Assembler), etc. The third (3rd) main classification of the programming langu