(This is the older material - click here - for current specification content)

1. Translators

People and computers do not speak the same language.

We wish it were so, and many science fiction shows pretend that this is the case.

But back to real life.

People have to write programs in order to instruct a computer what to do. This text is called 'source code' and most often it is written in a high level language that people find easy to use. On the other hand, a computer runs binary code '1010101011110101011' within its registers which is almost incomprehensible to people, this is called 'machine code' or 'object code'.

So there needs to be something to convert people-friendly source code into computer-friendly machine code. This is the role of translators. The rest of this mini-website takes you through the types of translators.