Communication Ethics book part for Brief Review. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

To briefly review, we've discussed three separate things up to this point:

  • Machine code, the actual code the computer executes. This is a series of numbers. The computer is not capable of executing anything else directly.
  • Assembly code, which is a nearly one-to-one transliteration of the machine code into something that a highly trained human can relatively easily read. This is generally the "meeting point" between human minds and the computer, although there is nothing impossible about reading machine code directly, it just requires the use of cognitive resources better spent elsewhere.
  • High-level languages, which are translated down into machine code by other programs.