A second-generation programming language is a term usually used to refer to some form of assembly language. Unlike first-generation programming languages, the code can be read and written fairly easily by a human, but it must be converted into a machine readable form in order to run on a computer. The coversion process is simply a mapping of the assembly language code into binary machine code (the first-generation language). The language is specific to and dependent on a particular processor family and environment. Since it is the native language of a processor it has significant speed advantages, but it requires more programming effort and is difficult to use effectively for large applications.
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Last updated: 08-30-2005 09:36:17
