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

I’m sure someone can explain it better but:

At the most basic level, a computer is just a set of transistors. They are switches that can be “on” and “off”, which are translated to 1 and 0 respectively.

What programs do is they give define the context for what patterns of 1s and 0s mean in different scenarios. For example: 01000001 in binary is the decimal number 65. It can also be the uppercase letter “A”. It all depends on the context provided by the “header record” in the program which explains to the computer which way to interpret that specific pattern.

Programming languages offer a necessary shortcut that allows programmers to write many instructions with minimal effort. If all programmers had to write binary there wouldn’t be many of us around