15 Discuss the concept of a ???memory hierarchy??? whereby memory closer to the CPU is faster, more
expensive, and smaller than memory at the next level. Arrange the different types of memory we have
discussed in such a hierarchy.
CHAP. 3] COMPUTER ORGANIZATION 43
44
CHAPTER 4
Software
This chapter will introduce a wide variety of topics related to computer software and programming languages.
We will discuss some of the history of computer languages, and describe some of the varieties of languages.
Then we will discuss the operation of language processing programs that build executable code from
source code written by programmers. All these discussions will be incomplete??”they are intended only to
introduce the topics. However, we hope to impart a sense of the variety of approaches to computer programming,
the historical variety of languages, and the basic mechanisms of compilers and interpreters.
GENERATIONS OF LANGUAGES
To understand the amazing variety of languages, programs, and products which computer scientists collectively
refer to as software, it helps to recall the history of this young discipline.
Each computer is wired to perform certain operations in response to instructions. An instruction is a pattern
of ones and zeros stored in a word of computer memory.
Pages:
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126