eli5: How do computers process binary digits as logic, from code?

Question

eli5: How do computers process binary digits as logic, from code?

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Answer 1

This is ELI5, not ELIEngineer.

1s and 0s run through processors as moving data around regions of memory. So you might move some data between addresses, add two numbers together, etc.

There are low level assembly languages that allow you to move data from one place to another and do these tasks that don’t require you to, personally, use they 1s and 0s as machine code.

Higher level languages give you shortcut syntax to do a bunch of operations at once. Such as incrementing a variable or looping some code, without requiring you to do the low level mathematical operations one at a time or memorizing memory addresses. You can focus more on the logic of the operations rather than some boring moving of data around in memory and cleaning up after yourself or worrying about touching different regions of memory.

Code at the high level is in “easy” to read syntax that allow you to have it compiled into the low level instructions to do an operation that’s requires several steps at levels below it, all the way down to thousands of binary instructions.