Section 4 - Hardware and Software - Programming Language Classification

Question 1

What is the accumulator?

Answer 1

A special memory location where all calculations are carried out

Question 2

What is the control unit?

Answer 2

The location in the processor that decoded instructions

Question 3

How is an instruction typically formatted in machine code?

Answer 3

They have an opcode and an operand

Question 4

What is machine code?

Answer 4

Binary code that the computer can directly execute

Question 5

What is a low-level programming language?

Answer 5

A programming language where the code reflects how the computer carries out the instruction

Question 6

What is assembly code?

Answer 6

A low-level programming language. The opcode was replaced by a short mnemonic and the operand was replaced by a decimal or hexadecimal number

Question 7

What was the first high-level language?

Answer 7

FORTRAN

Question 8

What are imperative high-level languages?

Answer 8

Each instruction is a command to perform some step in the program, with each step being a step-by-step instruction

Question 9

What are the advantages of high-level languages?

Answer 9

• They are relatively easy to learn
• It is easier and faster to write a program in a high-level language
• They are easier to understand, debug and maintain
• They are not dependent on the architecture of a particular machine
• There are many built-in library functions
• Different high-level languages are written for particular types of problems

Question 10

Why is assembly code still used?

Answer 10

When a program need to:
- Execute as fast as possible
- Occupy as little space as possible
- Manipulate individual bits and bytes

Question 11

What is assembly code still used in?

Answer 11

• Embedded systems
• Interrupt handlers
• Mobile phones

Question 12

What are the different types of translators?

Answer 12

• Assemblers
• Compilers
• Interpreters

Question 13

What is an assembler?

Answer 13

A program that will take each assembly language instruction and convert it to the corresponding machine code

Question 14

What is the source code of an assembler?

Answer 14

The assembly code input

Question 15

What is the object code of an assembler?

Answer 15

The machine code output

Question 16

What is a complier?

Answer 16

A program that translates a high-level language into machine code. It does this by scanning through the entire source code and then reconstructing it in machine code

Question 17

What is the source code of a compiler?

Answer 17

The code written by the programmer that is used as input data

Question 18

Why is object code from a compiler hardware-specific?

Answer 18

Different hardware platforms require different compilers

Question 19

What is an interpreter?

Answer 19

A translator that contains subroutines to carry out each high-level instruction.

Question 20

How does an interpreter work?

Answer 20

It looks at each line of the source program, analyses it, and if there are no syntax errors it will call the appropriate subroutine within its own program code to execute the command

Question 21

What is the bytecode?

Answer 21

The result of some high-level languages translation process

Question 22

What is the bytecode interpreter?

Answer 22

The interpreter for bytecode