Difference between high level & low level programming languages


A programming language or computer language is a language that is used by a programmer or developer to interact with a computer system. The programmer writes instructions and executes them to carry out some tasks. Broadly we can categorize programming languages into high-level and low-level programming languages.

So what are the differences between these two? We will discuss the same in this article.

Low-level programming language

A low-level programming language provides little or no abstraction to the computer’s instruction set architecture which means code written in a low-level language runs directly without the need of a compiler or interpreter.

Low-level programming generally refers to machine code or assembly language. The code written in a low-level language is machine-dependent and considered as close to the hardware.

We can further classify low-level language into –

  • Machine language (0, 1)
  • Assembly language

High-level programming language

A high-level language provides a strong abstraction to the computer’s instruction set architecture which means details of the computer are hidden from the programmer or outer world. These languages use a program to translate their instruction into low low-level or machine code called compiler or interpreter.

The code written in a high-level language is generally machine-independent so code written on one machine can be executed on another one. The benefit of using a high-level programming language is that easy to code, understand, and maintain a program.

For example – Python, Java, C++, C, PHP, etc.

We can further classify them into –

  • Procedural programming (e.g. – C Programming, Fortran)
  • Object-oriented programming ( e.g. – Java, Python, etc)

Note: – C and C++ are considered as middle-level programming languages as these languages use features of high-level programming languages and are also closely related to the machine

The key differences between high-level and low-level programming language

The following table shows the key differences between high-level and low-level programming languages.

Conclusion

I hope now you know the differences between high-level and low-level programming languages. Now if you have a query then write us in the comments below.

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