The instructions that a computer's hardware is able to
understand are in the form of binary code which is a series of zeros and ones. When
computers were invented all programming was done by creating computer binary code. This
was a very slow, tedious and error prone process. To make programming easier higher
level programming languages were introduced which include COBOL, BASIC,
etc.
There are two ways by which code written in high level
programming languages can be converted to binary code which is executed by the computer
hardware. One of them makes use of compilers. These directly convert the instructions
into machine language once the program has been fully typed. The output of compilers is
specific to the machine and is usually suitable for use on only one configuration of
operating systems.
Interpreters on the other hand convert
the instructions that are provided by a programmer into a form of code that differs from
binary code. As the program is executed each line is interpreted. This makes it easier
to debug a program as the programmer does not have to wait till the entire program has
been typed. The code that is delivered by the interpreter is converted to machine code
through a separate program that has to be present on the machine which compiles the code
each time the program is run. This makes it possible to have the same program run on
machines with different operating systems.
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