- Computers don’t understand human programming languages.
- Their processors (CPUs) only understand machine code, which is a sequence of binary numbers (1s and 0s).
- So programmers write in high-level programming language because we can’t write it in binary lol.
- It is then fed to a compiler before running on the computer
- A compiler
- Main job is to translate the source code (the human-readable code you write) into an equivalent program in another language, most often into machine code
- Native compiler
- A type of compiler that translates directly into machine language & creates an executable - a program that can be executed directly on the computer