Program Terms Definitions

• Source Code, in computer science, human-readable program statements written in a high-level or assembly language, as opposed to object code, which is derived from the source code and designed to be machine-readable.
• Object Code, in computer science, translated version of source code—the statements of a particular computer program that can either be read by the computer directly, or read by the computer after it is further translated. Object code may also be called target code or the object program.
  
  Software engineers write source code in high-level programming languages that people can read and understand. A computer’s central processing unit (CPU) cannot recognize and execute the instructions in source code until it is translated into machine code, a low-level language written in binary digits, 1s and 0s, called bits. These bits activate specific logic gates or circuits in the computer.
  
  A computer uses one of two translation programs, known as language processors, to convert source code into object code: an assembler or a compiler. Assemblers produce a strict one-for-one translation of source code into machine code. Compilers, on the other hand, can produce either machine code directly or create intermediate versions of the original source code in assembly language, which can then be translated to machine code in another step. Object code is the translation of source code produced by the language processor, so it may either be in machine code or in a language that can be reduced to machine code.
  
  Object code should not be confused with objects in computer science. Objects are self-contained, modular instruction sets that are used as programming units in object-oriented programming (OOP) languages, such as Smalltalk, C++, and Java.