Programming Languages

Among the decades, very many programming languages has been evolved. We list some most widely used in the context of HPC here.

Low-Level programming languages

• Machine code: That are 10001001011110 your computer can understand. You likely not.
• Assembler: human-readable (to somehow extent; many says 'for special humans'), but still very low-level. Allows the programmer to get the very last possible performance crumbs from the hardware, but in turn is hardware-dependent and very tedious to program. Highly-tuned libraries often contain ASM parts, often making this software less-portable. You should not start at assembler level when programming an application.

High-level programming languages

... are readable by humans. The source code is a text file, to be modufie to an executable file by a compiler (we do not want to introduce the definition bush about compiled and interpreted languages here).

Portability

• Fortran, the 1st wide-used high-level programming, used in HPC since 1954 and will likely be used for a lomg time, as there are still many Fortran projects around. Fortran handles multi-dimensional arrays comfortably. Due to some restrictions i the language

• C and C++
• JAVA

Script / interpreted languages

• Shell
• Python
• Perl

Other

• MATLAB