Absolute Beginner's Guide to Programming, Third Edition

The Language Translator

Your computer cannot actually understand BASIC, C, Java, or any of the other programming languages. “Wait!” you might yell. “The previous section explained that computer languages are important because the computer cannot understand English, or any other language that people speak, because there is too much ambiguity in speech.” Even so, the computer cannot understand C++ either, but it is easy for a program to translate C++ to the actual 1s and 0s that the computer does understand. A compiler takes programs written in high-level programming languages and translates them into a form readable by the computer.