Programming code tells the computer to do something, but what makes the code actually mean anything to the computer?

Question

Programming code tells the computer to do something, but what makes the code actually mean anything to the computer?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

A high level programming language such as C++ needs to be compiled into hardware specific language aka assembly. Assembly is just a bunch of basic commands the cpu understands which is basically a string of 0s and 1s. The 0s and 1s tells the hardware what to do.

To understand how 0s and 1s tells a computer what to do, imagine you have a train that can end up in 128 destinations and depending on how you program the switch tracks determine where the train ends up, and each destination is a different instruction, such as add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc.