What does the code that makes up programming languages look like?

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Take a language like Java. How was it originally created? I can’t wrap my head around how someone invented a computer language to run without having some “prior” language that it allows the first lines to function. Is it just Java all the way down, like someone wrote a single line of Java and then every other line was built on that?

What about the first computer language? What was the basis that that functioned on?

Thanks for any help, I hope that was phrased in a mildly intelligible way.

Edit; I’m trying to think of it like human language: at some point there was a first “word” spoken by someone and understood by another and from there the structure started to be born. What were the first “words” on a computer that led to where we are now?

In: Technology

36 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Computers are built with a language in hardware. Put a value in the part telling it what to do, put a memory location to tell it what number to do that command to.

Command 1: load accumulator with value at location 1000. Command 2: add to it the value of location 2000.

Then you write a whole program like that. Next step is to use that to write an assembler to make this easier. Instead of punching numbers into locations and executing, you say LDA 1000 and ADC 2000. The assembler program is just easier to remember machine language, and more complex ones do variables and such.

Then you use the assembler to write a compiler for a higher level language like C to make it even easier to program.

And then you use C to write Java.

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