A computer is totally worthless without any program to run on it. As you all know, any program needs a programming language to be written it - the language then becomes the medium via which the solution the program encompasses is communicated to the computer. But how exactly are the programming languages themselves developed? How is it known that the programming language would be capable of describing all programs that will ever be written in the language? How can programming languages limit or enhance the programs written in them? And finally, how exactly will the computer be able to execute that program?Everything starts with the processor inside a computer. Inside a processor will be at least a processor and some memory. The processor has its own language, called an Instruction Set. This is what you mean when you say x86, x64 or x86-64, IA-32, IA-64, AMD64, PowerPC etc. An Instruction Set is a set of Instructions - a specific bit string (16, 32, 64, 128 or 256 bits long) which the processor recognizes.
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English: A selection of programming language textb...
English: The generic logo of the dylan.NET program...An instruction triggers a specific response from the processor - fetch certain data from memory or perform certain operations on the data or write back the results to the memory. Consequently, instructions become the medium for communicating a program to the processor. All programs, regardless of whichever language they are written in, must be converted into a sequence of these instructions before they can be executed by the processor.
Before the first programming language was designed, manually creating these bit string sequences by hand was the only way to program a computer. Input devices like punched cards and floppy discs were created that had these bit string sequences hard coded and the computer would read off these devices and perform what was required. While this procedure...
Reason for the grade being unspecified
The reason the grade is left as unspecified because the essay wasn't a homework assignment, and was never graded as such. I just wrote it because many persons (CS and IT students) are confused about the workflow involved in designing programming languages, and asking questions like "If a C compiler is needed to compile a C program, how was the C compiler written?". In the hope that it helps others with such queries, I am making it available here.
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