Integrated Development Environment

Question 1

What are the characteristics of high-level programming languages?

Answer 1

• One instruction of high level code represents many instructions of machine code.
• Will work on different processors
• Code is easy to read, understand, edit etc.
• Must be translated into machine code before a computer is able to understand it
• Programs are less memory efficient and slower

Question 2

What are characteristics of low-level programming languages?

Answer 2

• One instruction of assembly only represents one instruction of machine code
• Written for only one type of processor
• Code is very difficult to read, understand, edit etc
• The code doesn’t need to be translated
• Memory efficient and faster
• Used for embedded systems and device drivers
• The programmer works with memory directly

Question 3

What is a compiler?

Answer 3

• Translates all of the source code all at the same time
• Creates an exe file
• Returns a list for all the errors in the program
• Once compiled the program runs quickly, but compiling can take a long time.

Question 4

What is an interpreter?

Answer 4

• Translates the code a line at a time
• Will return the first error it finds and then stop executing - useful for debugging
• Program will run more slowly because the code is being translated as the program is running.

Question 5

What is source code?

Answer 5

• Code written by the programmer

Question 6

What is object code?

Answer 6

• The code produced by a compiler or interpreter