responses are not always guaranteed to be accu- rate. While these tools can generate code, modifying them may require programming knowledge if they do not work as intended. Therefore, learning how to communicate with computers through program- ming languages is still necessary. 2.3. Programming languages Programming is defining a series of instructions for the computer to do something for us. But, as we have seen, we should use a programming language to de- fine those instructions. There are different types of programming lan- guages, but we can broadly categorize them into three main groups. Machine language This is the native language of a computer. Machine language instructions are written in binary code, which means they consist of ones and zeros. Fig- ure 2-1 shows an example of a program written inmachine language, which adds the numbers 1234 and 4321. This list of ones and zeros contains all the necessary commands and data to complete that task. The right column is a continuation of the left column (taken from: 1997 — Smith, S. W. — The scien- tist and engineer’s guide to digital signal processing). 1OLLLO0L 00000000 11010010 10100001 00000100 00000000 1001001 00000000 00001110 10001011 00000000 OOO1TIIO 00000000 0000010 1o111001 00000000 11100001 00000011 ooo10000 11000011 10001001 10100011 00001110 00000100 00000010 00000000 Figure 2-1. Binary code representing the sum of two numbers (taken from Smith, S. W.). Assembly language Assembly language was a significant improvement over machine language as it made programming less error-prone and faster. It uses a set of mnemon- ics, which are short descriptive words representing the instructions. Then, those words and instructions are translated into machine language. However, onemajor limitation of assembly languages is that they depend on the machine’s architecture, meaning that the code written on one machine may not work on another machine with different specifications. For example, the following code shows how to add the numbers 1234 and 4321 using assembly language (taken from: 1997 - Smith, S. W. - The scientist and en- gineer’s guide to digital signal processing). Analyze MOV CX,1234 MOV DS:[0],CX MOV CX,4321 MOV Ds:[2],cX MOV AX,DS;[0] MOV BX,DS:[2] ADD AX,BX MOV DS:[4],AX High-level language In the 1950s, anew generation of programming lan- guages emerged known as “high-level languages.”