Software Engineering Week 2 Tutorial
Task One
Answer the following questions.

Explain why programming languages are used.

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely.

Explain the difference between high level and low level programming languages

High level languages allow much more abstraction than low level languages. This allows algorithms and functions to be written without requiring detailed knowledge of the hardware used in the computing platform. The compiler provides this interface transparently for the programmer.

Low level languages will require more involvement with the actual register and interrupt interfaces to the hardware. This can provide more control and efficiency for the program and can be good for applications which need high speed execution, but high level compilers are much better at optimizing for speed now.

Explain the advantages and disadvantages of both high level and low level programming languages.

High level
Advantages
- more human-understandable, logical and easy-to-learn syntax that enables programmer to code more effectively
- portability - some of them can be hardware and OS indipendent, for example Java

Disadvantages
- they are usually slower than lower-lever languages, for example assembler is faster than C which is faster than C++ which is faster than c# or Java (on the same computer, of course)

low level
Advantages, which are not as big any more is potential for writting faster programs. Since you are writing at machine level you control the level of performance of the code created - in a high