GLOSSARY

Language A systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures or marks having understood meanings; the means by which animals communicate; a formal system of signs and symbols (as FORTRAN or a calculus in logic) including rules for the formation and transformation of admissible expressions.

Internalize (UK internalize) To accept or absorb an idea, attitude, belief, etc. so that it becomes part of your character.

Code An algorithm expressed in some programming language.

Compiler A language translator which converts an HLL program to the native machine language of a particular computing machine.

Source The input program to a translator.

Machine It is a device to do some job. It can be abstract or actual, and if actual, implemented as a program (a virtual machine) or as a physical hardware. A machine accepts and executes commands or instructions.

Program A list of commands to some machine, to do a specific job.

High-level Language A language for writing computer programs which looks more like human language than computer's native machine language and is therefore easier to understand.

Target The language of the machine or system on which the user program will be ultimately executed.

Token The Scanner detects various language atoms in the source code and represents them in the form of a uniform sized tokens, for ease of processing by the subsequent phases.

Phase Part of processing cycle during which a well-defined transformation of the input is made.

Optimization Systematic attempt by compiler to generate a final output, in the target language, which is a good approximation to what an experienced programmer of the target language would have written.

Statement A unit of specification of a complete action – which may be declarative or imperative.

Macro An identifier which specifies a portion of code. During macro expansion, a macro will be replaced by that code. Tip of an iceberg.

Meaning The actions, expressed in the target language, specified by a portion of the source code.

Assembly Conversion of an assembly language program into machine language program.

Parser – Syntax analyzer Identifies various language constructs, which determine the statement types and build the parse tree representation of the input program.

Scanner – Lexical analyzer Identifies various language atoms, maps them to tokens and passes them on to parser.

Formal A representation based on strict rules for simple, definitive, unambiguous and mathematical description of any system.

Execution Doing the computational work specified by the program.

Load-and-Go A scheme of HLL use, wherein the compiler, source code and the target code all reside in the machine memory simultaneously.

Interpreter An execution agent – which may be a software or hardware – which seemingly execute an HLL program directly. It usually has to interpret each statement just before its execution.

Syntax The grammatical structure of a program.

Instructions Commands to a computing machine.

Debugging Removal of “bugs” – errors – from a program.

Lexical Concerning the way various language atoms are expressed in terms of a specific character set.

Semantic Concerning the meaning of various statements in a program.

Loader A utility program which loads an executable program file on a secondary storage into the main memory of the machine. Depending upon the platform, it may have to do certain modifications to the code.

Linker A utility program which sets up address links between various parts and modules of a translated program and also any program libraries to be used.