Machine code

Machine code or machine language is a set of instructions executed directly by a computer's central processing unit (CPU).

Description

Each instruction performs a very specific task, such as a load, a jump, or an ALU operation on a unit of data in a CPU register or memory.

Every program directly executed by a CPU is made up of a series of such instructions.

Lowest level programming language

Numerical machine code (i.e., not assembly code) may be regarded as the lowest-level representation of a compiled or assembled computer program or as a primitive and hardware-dependent programming language.

Rarely done manually

While it is possible to write programs directly in numerical machine code, it is tedious and error prone to manage individual bits and calculate numerical addresses and constants manually.

It is thus rarely done today, except for situations that require extreme optimization or debugging.

Higher-level languages

Almost all practical programs today are written in higher-level languages or assembly language and translated to executable machine code by utilities such as compilers, assemblers and linkers.

Interpreted programming languages

Programs in interpreted languages are not translated into machine code although their interpreter (which may be seen as an executor or processor) typically consists of executable machine code generated from either:

• Assembly
• Source code in a High-level programming language)

See also

• Assembly language
• Compiler
• Computer program
• Computer programming
• Computer science
• Endianness
• High-level programming language
• Interpreter (computing)
• List of machine languages
• Low-level programming language
• Machine code monitor
• Micro-Professor MPF-I - teaching machine code
• Overhead code
• P-code machine
• Reduced instruction set computing (RISC)
• Very long instruction word

External links

• Machine code @ Wikipedia