Summary of Programming Languages

Chapter summary

In this chapter, we started by talking about why machine code is so difficult to understand and the motivation behind creating programming languages that are easier to use. We then saw how programming languages have evolved over the years, and how most of them are similar because they've influenced each other as they evolved.

We also discussed some different techniques—interpreting and compiling—that are used to translate source code into machine code. We saw how some languages use a mixed technique, employing both compiling and interpreting to complete translation.

At the end of this chapter, we learned about the syntax of a programming language and that each language has its own syntactical rules. We also learned that there is a close relationship between mathematics and programming, and that even though programming has borrowed some ideas and concepts from mathematics that have the same name, they do not necessarily do the same thing.