What are examples of first generation programming languages?

Answer 1

The only example of a first generation language is machine code, the native language of the machine. Every type of machine has its own variant of machine code specific to that machine's architecture.

Answer 2

Machine code is the only first generation language (1GL). Every family of CPUs has its own unique variant of machine code and even some CPUs within the same family can have slight variations. 1GL languages do not have names as such, as they are typically identified by the specific CPU architecture to which they belong.

Machine code is a 1GL for the simple reason that when the first computers were developed there were no high-level languages available to write any programs for it. Every operation that could be performed by the CPU was identified by a unique sequence of switches that were either on or off. The state of these switches could be notated as a sequence of 1s and 0s (binary values). Entering a sequence of such instructions, along with any required operands (also in binary), placed those instructions within the computer's "memory", thus creating a program. Once the program was entered it could be executed. However, this was a laborious process that was prone to error. Even if the binary sequence was correctly notated, a mistake during manual entry was difficult to trace. Eventually, card-readers were developed which made it much easier to input the programs using a sequence of cards with hole punches to denote the individual 1s and 0s, thus making it possible to produce larger and more complex programs that could be loaded and reloaded at will. However, they were still prone to error because everything still had to be written in binary. This problem continued until the development of the keyboard entry system and the first of the 2GL languages.

2GL languages allowed programmers to use a more human-readable, symbolic language where each instruction was reduced to a unique symbol typically composed of 3 letters (such as CMP, JMP and JNZ) and the operands could be entered using binary, octal, hexadecimal or decimal notation. Of course, the machine's of the day could not understand this new language, thus a program had to be written (using 1GL) which could translate this symbolic 2GL language into 1GL machine code. These programs were known as assemblers and the 2GL language became known as assembly language. Like machine code, each CPU has its own variant of assembler.

Although this made programming easier, it was still a laborious process as programs became larger and more complex. Eventually, high-level languages began to appear, in the form of the first of the 3GL languages. These languages used a more complex, English-like syntax that allowed programmers to generate many assembly instructions from a single statement. However, once again, the computer did not initially understand these new languages so 2GL had to be used to program the computer so that the computer itself could generate the required 2GL code from the 3GL language which could then be assembled separately to produce the 1GL machine code. These programs became known as compilers and they quickly evolved to emit the 1GL machine code directly. Pretty soon, 3GL languages were being used to create a wide variety of new or improved 3GL languages as well as creating more efficient compilers and assemblers.

Nowadays, when a new CPU architecture is developed, an assembler and/or compiler can be developed upon another machine using a 3GL language (typically C or C++), thus making it possible to write programs for these new architectures without resorting to the intricacies of the new machine's 1GL.

Answer 3

This is a type of computer language that you can use in programming. Some examples include PowerBuilder, Visual DataFlex, Genero, Quest, and LINC.

Answer 4

Smalltalk, Ada-95, C++.

Answer 5

example for second generaton language

Answer 6

pidgeon