PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ignou BCA 3rd semester notes

You must appreciate the fact that the programming languages are created by, we,
human beings. These languages are used to communicate instructions to the machines especially computers so that the programs can control the behaviour of the hardware of the machines to get desired results. Basically, the hardware of the computers understands only the language of the hardware which is called the machine language.
The hardware is unable to understand and decipher any program written in any other programming language. Moreover, every type of a CPU has its own machine
language. Therefore, in order to make the hardware of a computer understand the
instructions contained in a program written in any other programming language, a
mechanism called ‘translator’ is required. This translator converts the program written in programming languages other than the native machine language of the CPU (hardware) into the native machine language of a particular CPU on which this
program is intended to be executed. Every programming language must have its own translator for the programs written in it to be executed or run on the computer
hardware. Various types of translators available can be categorized into assemblers, interpreters or compilers.