Components of a Computer

Hardware Software Firmware Skinware

Hardware
Objects that you can actually touch, like disks, disk drives, display screens, keyboards, printers, boards, and chips. In contrast, software is untouchable. Software exists as ideas, concepts, and symbols, but it has no substance. Books provide a useful analogy. The pages and the ink are the hardware, while the words, sentences, paragraphs, and the overall meaning are the software. A computer without software is like a book full of blank pages -- you need software to make the computer useful just as you need words to make a book meaningful.

Software
Is a set of programs which are used to drive the hardware so that it does its useful work. Software is intangible. Major types of software are.
System Software Programs Programming Languages

System Software
Software is often divided into two categories: Systems software : Includes the operating system and all the utilities that enable the computer to function. Applications software : Includes programs that do real work for users. For example, word processors, spreadsheets, and database management systems fall under the category of applications software.

Firmware
Software (programs or data) that has been written onto read-only memory (ROM). Firmware is a combination of software and hardware. ROMs, PROMs and EPROMs that have data or programs recorded on them are firmware.

Skinware

Programming Languages

Programming language A vocabulary and set of grammatical rules for instructing a computer to perform specific tasks. It usually refers to high-level languages, such as BASIC, C, C++, COBOL, FORTRAN, Ada, and Pascal. Each language has a unique set of keywords (words that it understands) and a special syntax for organizing program instructions. High-level programming languages, while simple compared to human languages, are more complex than the languages the computer actually understands, called machine languages. Each different type of CPU has its own unique machine language.

Lying between machine languages and high-level languages are languages called assembly languages. Assembly languages are similar to machine languages, but they are much easier to program in because they allow a programmer to substitute names for numbers. Machine languages consist of numbers only. Lying above high-level languages are languages called fourth-generation languages (usually abbreviated 4GL).

The main advantage of high-level languages over low-level languages is that they are easier to read, write, and maintain. Ultimately, programs written in a high-level language must be translated into machine language by a compiler or interpreter. The first high-level programming languages were designed in the 1950s. Now there are dozens of different languages, including Ada, Algol, BASIC, COBOL, C, C++, FORTRAN, LISP, Pascal, and Prolog

Regardless of what language you use, you eventually need to convert your program into machine language so that the computer can understand it. There are two ways to do this: compile the program interpret the program The choice of which language to use depends on the type of computer the program is to run on, what sort of program it is, and the expertise of the programmer.

Compiler
Program that translates source code into object code. The compiler derives its name from the way it works, looking at the entire piece of source code and collecting and reorganizing the instructions. Because compilers translate source code into object code, which is unique for each type of computer, many compilers are available for the same language.

Interpreter
A program that executes instructions written in a high-level language. An interpreter translates high-level instructions into an intermediate form, which it then executes. The advantage is that it does not need to go through the compilation stage during which machine instructions are generated. For this reason, interpreters are sometimes used during the development of a program.

Assembly language
A programming language that is once removed from a computer's machine language. Assembly languages have the same structure and set of commands as machine languages, but they enable a programmer to use names instead of numbers. Each type of CPU has its own machine language and assembly language.

Machine Language
lowest-level programming language. Machine languages are the only languages understood by computers. While easily understood by computers, machine languages are almost impossible for humans to use because they consist entirely of numbers. Every CPU has its own unique machine language. Programs must be rewritten or recompiled, therefore, to run on different types of computers.