A programming language is a notational language
used to communicate with the computer system. The process of giving detailed
step-by-step instructions to the computer in a particular programming language
to accomplish a well-defined task is ‘programming’. There are three main
categories of programming language.
·
Machine language: consists of binary digits
i.e. series OS 1s and 0s. This is the actual language understood by the
computer.
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·
Low level language: this is but a symbolic
language. Symbols and/or numeric codes are used to represent machine
operations. A typical example is the Assembly language.
·
·
High level language: this is a procedural
language. It is similar to the human language. PASCAL, FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL,
are few examples of high level languages.
SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS OF A LANGUAGE
A natural language like
English or French has its own syntax and associated semantics in the library of
the language. Syntax can be said to be the laws governing the formation of
valid statements in a language. As an analogy: consider the English statement a
baby tells his mother, ‘mummy, I am hungry’. His mummy can fathom what her baby
needs but the baby’s statement is incorrect in English language. We can infer
that the statement made by the baby is syntactically wrong but semantically
correct because his mother can make a reasonable deduction from the statement.
On the other hand, let us
consider a statement like: ‘Baby, your Daddy kicked the bucket’. Because the
baby does not yet have the knowledge of idiomatic expressions, the baby
actually thinks his daddy uses his leg to kick the bucket and perhaps thinking
the bucket starts rolling on the floor. For an adolescent with appreciable
knowledge of idiomatic expressions, he knows at once that the baby’s father
died. A statement like this is syntactically correct but semantically wrong as
it is considered ambiguous because it has more than one meaning. Simply put, it
does not have a unique meaning. It is undesirable to give a statement like this
to a computer because of its ambiguity. So, one is safe to say learning a
language (be it a natural or a programming language) is basically learning
about the syntax and semantics of the language as well as its applications.
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