The hardware components of a computer system are electronic devices in which the basic unit of information is either a 0 or a 1, corresponding to two states of an electronic signal. For instance, in one of the popular hardware technologies a 0 is represented by 0V while a 1 is represented by 5 V. Programs and data must therefore be expressed using this binary alphabet consisting of 0 and 1. Programs written using only these binary digits are machine language programs. At this level of programming, operations such as ADD and SUBTRACT are each represented by
a unique pattern of 0s and 1s, and the computer hardware is designed to interpret these sequences. Programming at this level is tedious since the programmer has to work with sequences of 0s and 1s and needs to have very detailed knowledge of the computer structure. The tedium of machine language programming is partially alleviated by usingsymbols such as ADD and SUB rather than patterns of 0s and 1s for these operations. Programming at the symbolic level is called assembly language programming. An assembly language programmer also is required to have a detailed knowledge of the machine structure, because the operations permitted in the assembly language are primitive and the instruction format and capabilities depend on the hardware organization of the machine. An assembler program is used totranslate assembly language programs into machine language. Use of high-level programming languages such as FORTRAN, COBOL, C, and JAVA further reduces the requirement of an intimate knowledge of the machine organization. A compiler program is needed to translate a high-level language
program into the machine language. A separate compiler is needed for each highlevel language used in programming the computer system. Note that the assembler and the compiler are also programs written in one of those languages and can translate an assembly or high-level language program, respectively, into the machine language.
