Lesson 18 Flashcards
The central processing unit
CPU is the brain of the computer and is a collection of electronic circuits that execute the instructions in the software being run.
Instructions are limited to:
Store in memory
Load from memory
Basic math
Bit shifting
Bitwise logical operations
Interpreters
When you run a Python program it is first converted into bytecode and stored in a .pyc file
Bytecode is like assembly code each operation is a single CPI instruction, not human readable.
Executed on a virtual machine
Some errors are discovered during byte code conversion but others are only found after running
Compilers
When you run a compiled language it is converted into machine code for the computer hardware to run
Linking: identifying other machine language libraries that will be used during execution
Loading: storing executable files in program memory
