People can look at computer systems from several different perspectives depending on the type of their interaction. We use the concept of abstraction to look at only the details that are necessary from a particular viewpoint. For example, a computer user interacts with the system through an application program. Suppose you are interested in browsing the Internet. Your obvious choice is to interact with the system through a Web browser such as the Fire fox (FF) or Internet Explorer (IE). On the other hand, if you are a computer architect, you are interested in the internal details that do not interest a normal user of the system.
From the programmer’s viewpoint, there exists a hierarchy from low-level languages to high-level languages (see Figure 1). At the lowest level, we have the machine language that is the language understood by the machine hardware. Because digital computers use 0 and 1 as their alphabet, machine language naturally uses 1s and 0s to encode the instructions. One level up, there is the assembly language as shown in Figure 1. Assembly language does not use 1s and 0s; instead, it uses mnemonics to express the instructions. Assembly language is closely related to the machine language.
- Guide to RISC Processors for Programmers and Engineers by Sivarama P. Dandamudi, Springer (2005), ISBN 0-387-21017-2.
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