Smart Translation

Computers don't speak English, or Urdu or Cantonese for that matter. They have their own special languages that human programmers have to learn if they want to create new applications. Even those programming languages aren't the language computers really speak. They only understand 1s and 0s. The programmers have to employ translators to convert what they say into Computerese (actually binary): just as if I wanted to speak with someone from Poland, I'd need a polish translator. Computer translators aren't called translators though. They are called ‘compilers', and just as it might be a Pole who translated for me into Polish, compilers are special programs that can take text written in a programming language and convert it into binary.

Read the full version of this article on the cs4fn blog