Programming languages Most readers have been introduced to programming via a high-level programming language such as Python or MATLAB. Programs written in such languages run on processors, which at the end of the day are just circuits. The language that the processor understands is comprised of numbers. Specific numbers that are understood by a processor as commands, called instructions,Instructions can trigger operations, which are restricted to a very limited set of basic logical and mathematical operations. Instructions include the name of the operation (opcode)Opcodes to perform and the data on which to perform it.1 A programPrograms is just a sequence of instructions, so it can be represented as numbers2 in memory, such asMemory \[\begin{align*} \text{address \quad} & \text{contents} \\ \texttt{0 \quad} & \texttt{0100 0101 1110 1000 0000 0000 0000 0000} \\[-4pt] \texttt{1 …
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