go to previous page   go to home page   go to next page hear noise highlighting

Answer:

No—the smaller chip might have a well chosen set of operations that work together better and faster than the poorly chosen operations of the other processor.


High Level Programming Languages

It is rare for programmers to write programs in machine language like we did for the light bulb. The executable files (the directly runnable machine language programs) for most applications contain hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of machine language instructions. It would be very hard to create something like that from scratch.

As an experiment, look through your hard disk with the file listing utility (the "Explorer" on Microsoft systems.) Look at the size of the something.EXE files. There are about four bytes per machine instruction on Intel processors, so divide by four to get the number of instructions.

Most programs are created using a high level programming language such as Java, C, C++, or BASIC. With a high level language, a programmer creates a program using powerful, "big" operations which will later be converted into many little machine operations.

For example, here is a line from a program in the language C:

int sum = 0;

This declares and initializes a variable to zero (a big operation).

The machine operations that correspond to this big operation set up a part of main memory to hold a number, store the number zero there, and arrange things so other parts of the program can use it. It might take a hundred machine operations to do all this. Obviously, it is easier for a human programmer to ask for all these operations using C.


QUESTION 8:

Say that a corporation pays programmers $50 an hour. Will the corporation want programmers to program in machine language or in a high level language?


go to previous page   go to home page   go to next page