At the time, this capability was a breakthrough.
Today, most programming is done in higher-level languages, rather than assembly language. When you program
in a higher-level language, you write statements in the syntax of your programming language (e.g., Java, C,
Python), and the language processor translates your code into the correct set of machine instructions to execute
your intent. If you want to run the same program on a different computer with a different instruction set, you
can often simply supply your code to the appropriate language processor on the new computer. Your source code
may not change, but the translation of your code into machine instructions will be different because the
computer instruction sets are different. The language processor has the responsibility to translate standard
higher-level programming syntax into the correct machine instruction bit patterns.
Machine instructions are represented as patterns of ones and zeros in a computer word, just as numbers and
characters are. Some of the bits in the word are set aside to provide the ???op-code,??? or operation to perform.
Examples of op-codes are ADD, Jump, Compare, and AND. Other bits in the instruction word specify the values
to operate on, the ???operands.
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