I'm a freshman and I've just started my computer science classes, so I'm still pretty new to programming. My professor talks about high and low-level languages in the context of source code versus executable code, but I often see discussions online where high and low-level languages are mentioned in terms of programming languages. Are they referring specifically to interpreted languages versus those that compile directly into native code, or is there more to this distinction?
1 Answer
Low-level languages are closer to the hardware and usually give you more control. For example, with assembly, you're directly manipulating registers. On the other hand, high-level languages like Python make it easier by abstracting those details. So in Python, you can just set a variable without worrying about where it's stored in memory.
Thank you so much for clarifying! That makes things a lot clearer!