Monday, April 10, 2017

2nd Generation Language

2nd Generation Language or Assembly Language 

Second-generation programming language (2GL) is a generational way to categorize assembly languages. The term was coined to provide a distinction from higher level third-generation programming languages (3GL) such as COBOL and earlier machine code languages.
Second-generation programming languages have the following properties:
  • The code can be read and written by a programmer. To run on a computer it must be converted into a machine readable form, a process called assembly.
  • The language is specific to a particular processor family and environment.
 
It is the first step to improve the programming structure. You should know that computer can handle numbers and letter. Therefore some combination of letters can be used to substitute for number of machine codes.
The set of symbols and letters forms the Assembly Language and a translator program is required to translate the Assembly Language to machine language. This translator program is called `Assembler'. It is considered to be a second-generation language.

Advantages Assembly Language:
1.The symbolic programming of Assembly Language is easier to understand and saves a lot of time and effort of the programmer.
2.It is easier to correct errors and modify program instructions.
3.Assembly Language has the same efficiency of execution as the machine level language. Because this is one-to-one translator between assembly language program and its corresponding machine language program.

Disadvantages Assembly Language:
1.One of the major disadvantages is that assembly language is machine dependent. A program written for one computer might not run in other computers with different hardware configuration.


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