High level programming language

Features

"High-level language" refers to the higher level of abstraction from machine language. Rather than dealing with registers, memory addresses and call stacks, high-level languages deal with variables, arrays, objects, complex arithmetic or boolean expressions, subroutines and functions, loops, threads, locks, and other abstract computer science concepts, with a focus on usability over optimal program efficiency. Unlike low-level assembly languages, high-level languages have few, if any, language elements that translate directly into a machine's native opcodes. Other features, such as string handling routines, object-oriented language features, and file input/output, may also be present.

Abstraction penalty

High-level languages intend to provide features which standardize common tasks, permit rich debugging, and maintain architectural agnosticism; while low-level languages often produce more efficient code through optimization for a specific system architecture. Abstraction penalty is the border that prevents high-level programming techniques from being applied in situations where computational limitations, standards conformance or physical constraints require access to low-level architectural resources (fi, response time(s), hardware integration). High-level programming exhibits features like more generic data structures/operations, run-time interpretation, and intermediate code files; which often result in execution of far more operations than necessary, higher memory consumption, and larger binary program size. For this reason, code which needs to run particularly quickly and efficiently may require the use of a lower-level language, even if a higher-level language would make the coding easier. In many cases, critical portions of a program mostly in a high-level language can be hand-coded in assembly language, leading to a much faster, more efficient, or simply reliably functioning optimised program.

However, with the growing complexity of modern microprocessor architectures, well-designed compilers for high-level languages frequently produce code comparable in efficiency to what most low-level programmers can produce by hand, and the higher abstraction may allow for more powerful techniques providing better overall results than their low-level counterparts in particular settings. High-level languages are designed independent of a specific computing system architecture. This facilitates executing a program written in such a language on any computing system with compatible support for the Interpreted or JIT program. High-level languages can be improved as their designers develop improvements. In other cases, new high-level languages evolve from one or more others with the goal of aggregating the most popular constructs with new or improved features. An example of this is Scala which maintains backward compatibility with Java which means that programs and libraries written in Java will continue to be usable even if a programming shop switches to Scala; this makes the transition easier and the lifespan of such high-level coding indefinite. In contrast, low-level programs rarely survive beyond the system architecture which they were written for without major revision. This is the engineering 'trade-off' for the 'Abstraction Penalty'.

Relative meaning

Examples of high-level programming languages in active use today include Python, Visual Basic, Delphi, Perl, PHP, ECMAScript, Ruby and many others.

The terms high-level and low-level are inherently relative. Some decades ago, the C language, and similar languages, were most often considered "high-level", as it supported concepts such as expression evaluation, parameterised recursive functions, and data types and structures, while assembly language was considered "low-level". Today, many programmers might refer to C as low-level, as it lacks a large runtime-system (no garbage collection, etc.), basically supports only scalar operations, and provides direct memory addressing. It, therefore, readily blends with assembly language and the machine level of CPUs and microcontrollers.

Assembly language may itself be regarded as a higher level (but often still one-to-one if used without macros) representation of machine code, as it supports concepts such as constants and (limited) expressions, sometimes even variables, procedures, and data structures. Machine code, in its turn, is inherently at a slightly higher level than the microcode or micro-operations used internally in many processors.

Execution modes

There are three general modes of execution for modern high-level languages:

Interpreted 

When code written in a language is interpreted, its syntax is read and then executed directly, with no compilation stage. A program called an interpreter reads each program statement, following the program flow, then decides what to do, and does it. A hybrid of an interpreter and a compiler will compile the statement into machine code and execute that; the machine code is then discarded, to be interpreted anew if the line is executed again. Interpreters are commonly the simplest implementations of the behavior of a language, compared to the other two variants listed here.

Compiled 

When code written in a language is compiled, its syntax is transformed into an executable form before running. There are two types of compilation:

Source-to-Source Translated or Trans-compiled

Code written in a language may be translated into terms of a lower-level programming language for which native code compilers are already widely available. JavaScript and the C programming language are common targets for such translators. See CoffeeScript, Chicken Scheme, and Eiffel as examples. Specifically, the generated C and C++ code can be seen (as generated from the Eiffel programming language when using the EiffelStudio IDE) in the EIFGENs directory of any compiled Eiffel project. In Eiffel, the "Translated" process is referred to as Trans-compiling or Trans-compiled, and the Eiffel compiler as a Transcompiler.

Note that languages are not strictly "interpreted" languages or "compiled" languages. Rather, implementations of language behavior use interpretation or compilation. For example, Algol 60 and Fortran have both been interpreted (even though they were more typically compiled). Similarly, Java shows the difficulty of trying to apply these labels to languages, rather than to implementations; Java is compiled to bytecode and the bytecode is subsequently executed by either interpretation (in a JVM) or compilation (typically with a just-in-time compiler such as HotSpot, again in a JVM). Moreover, compilation, trans-compiling, and interpretation are not strictly limited to just a description of the compiler artifact (binary executable or IL assembly).

High-level language computer architecture

Alternatively, it is possible for a high-level language to be directly implemented by a computer – the computer directly executes the HLL code. This is known as a high-level language computer architecture – the computer architecture itself is designed to be targeted by a specific high-level language.