By Anthony Aaby
A language translator is a program which translates programs from source language into an equivalent program in an object language.
Keywords and phrases: source-language, object-language, syntax-directed, compiler, assembler, linker, loader, parser, scanner, top-down, bottom-up, context-free grammar, regular expressions.
Introduction
A computer constructed from actual physical devices is termed an actual computer or hardware computer. From the programming point of view, it is the instruction set of the hardware that defines a machine. An operating system is built on top of a machine to manage access to the machine and to provide additional services. The services provided by the operating system constitute another machine, a virtual machine.
A programming language provides a set of operations. Thus, for example, it is possible to speak of a Java computer or a Haskell computer. For the programmer, the programming language is the computer; the programming language defines a virtual computer. The virtual machine for Simple consists of a data area which contains the association between variables and values and the program which manipulates the data area.