Oh my God, oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, oh, man.

Oh, my.

And the world. Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast, episode 96,

How Computers work Work Part 6,

High-Level Programming and Software. I'm your host, James Fodor. So in this episode,

we finally come to the conclusion of our long series on how computers work. In this episode, I'm going to discuss high-level programming languages and how those differ from assembly languages and also a little bit about how compilers work.

I'll then introduce briefly some of the key programming concepts, including control structures, data structures, algorithms, and I'll give an example of an algorithm to just illustrate the basic idea.

And then I'll go through a brief example of a program

of how you might code a simple game in a high-level language

just to give you the sense of how programming works in high-level languages.

And to conclude the episode, then I'll go through a summary

and integrative account of how computers work drawing upon

all of the material that

we've discussed in these previous three episodes.

So, to begin, let's talk about high-level programming languages.

In the previous episode, I talked about assembly language, which is essentially a symbolic

form of machine code, which is much easier to program in allowing you to use short symbolic forms for up codes, instead of having to remember the binary sequence, and being able to use symbolic addresses instead of having to specify each address in binary, etc.

Assembler is much easier to program in than machine code, but even assembly is still quite tedious to programming because you still

have to keep track of loading individual variables into particular registers and moving them,

moving data from here to there, and performing very low-level operations. So it's still very

difficult and tedious to programming, even though it's easier than machine code. Instead, most programmers

these days program in one of various high-level programming languages.

...