 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "First-generation programming language" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(September 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Afirst-generation programming language (1GL) is amachine-levelprogramming language and belongs to thelow-level programming languages.[1]
The first-generation programming languages (1GL) are a grouping of programming languages that are machine-level languages used to programfirst-generation computers. Originally, notranslator was used tocompile orassemble a first-generation language. The first-generation programming instructions were entered through thefront panel switches of the computer system.
The instructions in a 1GL are made ofbinary numbers, represented by 1s and 0s. This makes the language suitable for the understanding of the machine but far more difficult to interpret and learn by the human programmer.
The main advantage of programming in 1GL is that the code can run very fast and very efficiently, precisely because the instructions are executed directly by thecentral processing unit (CPU). One of the main disadvantages of programming in alow-level language is that, when an error occurs, the code is not as easy to fix.
First-generation languages are very much adapted to a specific computer and CPU, and code portability is therefore significantly reduced in comparison tohigher-level languages. Modern tools such as native-code compilers are used to produce machine-level code from a higher-level language.
1. Nwankwogu S.E (2016). Programming Languages and their history.