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JithinMechery
JithinMechery

Reputation: 53

Difference between Machine-oriented high-level language and high-level language

I know that Babbage is a machine-oriented high-level language for the GEC 4080 series machines. What is the difference between Machine-oriented high-level language and high-level language?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 734

Answers (1)

Yosi Mor
Yosi Mor

Reputation: 193

The Babbage language is much more "machine-oriented" than it is "high-level", and it would be more accurate to describe it as a "high-level assembly language".

As such, the heart of the language consists of statements having a one-to-one correspondence with the machine code into which they directly assemble (as in any assembly language). What makes this assembly language "high-level", then, is the addition of control statements for conditional branching and looping ("WHILE ... DO", "REPEAT ... WHILE", ... etc.).

However, this is in stark contrast to true "high-level" languages (such as Smalltalk, Eiffel, and Haskell), where the "higher the level", the farther is the correspondence to the final machine code that results after compilation/assembly/linkage.

Even in languages such such as C, which some have called a "glorified assembly language," the correspondence to the final machine code is still quite far from being "one-to-one."

Upvotes: 1

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