QUESTION 8:
Say that a corporation pays programmers $50 an hour. Will the corporation want programmers to program in machine language or in a high level language?
No—the smaller chip might have a well chosen set of operations that work together better and faster than the poorly chosen operations of the other processor.
It is very rare for programmers to write programs in machine language
like we did for the electric toothbruch.
The executable files (the directly runnable machine language programs)
for most applications contain hundereds of thousands of (if not millions)
of machine language instructions.
It would be very hard to create something like that.
As an experiment, look through your hard disk with the file listing utility
(the explorer on Microsoft systems.)
Look at the size of the something.EXE files.
(Remember that there are usually several bytes per machine instruction.)
Most programs are created using a high level programming language such as Java, C, C++, or BASIC. With a high level language, a programmer creates a program using powerful, "big" operations which will later be converted into many little machine operations.
For example, here is a line from a program in the language "C":
int sum = 0;
The machine operations that correspond to this line will set up a small part of main memory to hold a number, store the number zero there, and arrange things so other parts of the program can use it. It might take a hundred machine operations to do all this. Obviously, it is easier for a human programer to ask for all these operations using "C".
Say that a corporation pays programmers $50 an hour. Will the corporation want programmers to program in machine language or in a high level language?