Program Counter - Consequences in High-level Programming

Consequences in High-level Programming

Modern high-level programming languages still follow the sequential-execution model and, indeed, a common way of identifying programming errors is with a “procedure execution” in which the programmer's finger identifies the point of execution as a PC would. The high-level language is essentially the machine language of a virtual machine, too complex to be built as hardware but instead emulated or interpreted by software.

However, new programming models transcend sequential-execution programming:

  • When writing a multi-threaded program, the programmer may write each thread as a sequence of instructions without specifying the timing of any instruction relative to instructions in other threads.
  • In an integrated development environment, the programmer may write sequences of instructions to respond to events without specifying an overall sequence for the program.

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