Programming Languages
A computer program—whether it's an applet, utility, application, or operating system—is nothing more than a list of instructions for the brain inside your computer, the microprocessor, to carry out. A microprocessor instruction, in turn, is a specific pattern of bits, a digital code. Your computer sends the list of instructions making up a program to its microprocessor one at a time. Upon receiving each instruction, the microprocessor looks up what function the code says to do, then it carries out the appropriate action.
Microprocessors by themselves only react to patterns of electrical signals. Reduced to its purest form, the computer program is information that finds its final representation as the ever-changing pattern ...
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