A lot of computer nerds (Sorry! Engineers!!) know about something called machine language or machine code…maybe even a few electronics engineers…but for most it’s still just a jargon they have heard of, but never bothered googling By definition, Machine code or machine language is a set of instructions executed directly by a computer’s central processing unit (CPU). These instructions can be anything like (warning! The next few lines are specifically for engineering students who have worked with 8085 or 8086 microprocessors) load, a jump, or an ALU operation on a unit of data in a CPU register or memory. Every program directly executed by a CPU is made up of a series of such instructions. So you must be wondering what machine language consists of right? Well, they consist entire of numbers and mostly binary and is almost impossible for humans to use. It has been said that machine code is so unreadable that the United States Copyright Office cannot identify whether a particular encoded program is an original work of authorship. That’s why an assembly level language is used by programmers! (We will get to assembly language some other time :p)
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