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A low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture—commands or functions in the language map that are structurally similar to processor's instructions. Generally, this refers to either machine code or assembly language. Because of the low (hence the word) abstraction between the language and machine language, low-level languages are sometimes described as being "close to the hardware". Programs written in low-level languages tend to be relatively non-portable, due to being optimized for a certain type of system architecture.
Low-level languages can convert to machine code without a compiler or interpreter – second-generation programming languages use a simpler processor called an assembler – and the resulting code runs directly on the processor. A program written in a low-level language can be made to run very quickly, with a small memory footprint. An equivalent program in a high-level language can be less efficient and use more memory. Low-level languages are simple, but considered difficult to use, due to numerous technical details that the programmer must remember. By comparison, a high-level programming language isolates execution semantics of a computer architecture from the specification of the program, which simplifies development.
Machine code
Machine code is the only language a computer can process directly without a previous transformation. Currently, programmers almost never write programs directly in machine code, because it requires attention to numerous details that a high-level language handles automatically. Furthermore, it requires memorizing or looking up numerical codes for every instruction, and is extremely difficult to modify.
True machine code is a stream of raw, usually binary, data. A programmer coding in "machine code" normally codes instructions and data in a more readable form such as decimal, octal, or hexadecimal which is translated to internal format by a program called a loader or toggled into the computer's memory from a front panel.
Although few programs are written in machine languages, programmers often become adept at reading it through working with core dumps or debugging from the front panel.
Example: A function in hexadecimal representation of 32-bit x86 machine code to calculate the nth Fibonacci number:
8B542408 83FA0077 06B80000 0000C383 FA027706 B8010000 00C353BB 01000000 B9010000 008D0419 83FA0376 078BD989 C14AEBF1 5BC3
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Low-level programming in high-level languages
During the late 1960s, high-level languages such as PL/S, BLISS, BCPL, extended ALGOL (for Burroughs large systems) and C included some degree of access to low-level programming functions. One method for this is Inline assembly, in which assembly code is embedded in a high-level language that supports this feature. Some of these languages also allow architecture-dependent compiler optimization directives to adjust the way a compiler uses the target processor architecture.