High Level Language Primitives
A high-level programming language (HLL) program is composed of discrete statements and primitive data types that may also be perceived to perform a single operation or represent a single data item, but at a more abstract level than those provided by the machine. Copying a data item from one location to another may actually involve many machine instructions that, for instance,
- calculate the address of both operands in memory, based on their positions within a data structure,
- convert from one data type to another
before finally
- performing the final store operation to the target destination.
Some HLL statements, particularly those involving loops, can generate thousands or even millions of primitives in a low level language - which comprise the genuine instruction path length the processor has to execute at the lowest level. This perception has been referred to as the "Abstraction penalty"
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