Hardware & Software Flashcards
What is Hardware?
The physical components of a computer e.g: CPU, Memory
What is Software?
A set of instructions, data or programs used to operate computers and execute specific tasks.
What is System Software?
Provides a platform for other software
What is Application Software?
Designed to carry out specific tasks, not on the operating of the computing itself
What is an Operating System?
A program that oversees the processes on a computer.
What is a Utility Program?
A program specifically designed to help manage system and/or application software
What is a Library?
Collection of reusable premade files, functions, routines etc that can be referenced by computer programmers.
What are Imperative Languages?
Program code is executed one line at a time.
Code is written by a programmer using sequence, selection, iteration and subroutines/procedures.
Referred to as Procedural Language
Imperative Languages:
Object Oriented
Procedural
Facts about Machine Code?
Least Abstract
Closest to what actually happens on the computer
Programming directly in 1’s and 0’s
These translate directly into matching electrical signals.
Facts about Assembly Language?
Programming using short code words known as mnemonics.
received by computer and looked up in tables
If a match is found it replaces the word with its binary.
One-to-one relationship
Written in assembly language and translated by an assembler
Advantages of Assembly Language
- Same efficiency as machine code due to one-to-one nature
- produce very precise, locally optimized and efficient code
Direct access to system-level features without going through software interface, improving speed of program. - complete control of code
Disadvantages of Assembly Language
- Machine Dependent
- Code produced is hard/impossible to port
- Barely any programmers in assembly (reason why HLL exists)
- Long and tedious to write and very bug prone.
- difficult to understand and modify/maintain
