You’ve read about BASIC, machine language (ML) and assembly language programming in SYNTAX. What are these languages?
BASIC (which stands for Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a high-level language. This means that you do not communicate directly with the machine in its native language, but in a more complicated one (that is, more complicated to the computer). Programs in BASIC go through a BASIC interpreter, built into the ROM, to change them into machine-readable code. BASIC is an easy language for beginning programmers because the commands resemble simple English words. Programs in BASIC execute more slowly than those in lower level languages because they are broken down into more machine language commands than BASIC commands you started with. Every time you hit (NL), for example, the BASIC interpreter converts that single instruction into 7 ML commands.
Machine language is just that–the language the computer understands directly. The computer thinks only in ones and zeros, so this language consists solely of binary representations of commands and data.
Because most of us don’t think in binary, we have assembly language as a way to write programs that are easier for both the computer and us to understand. Assembly language uses symbols to stand for memory addresses, commands and data. You can enter assembled programs yourself using a program like Hex Monitor (May 81) or you can run it through an assembler, a program that translates assembly language into machine language that the computer can read directly. Unlike BASIC programs, assembly symbols translate one-to-one into ML commands.