A computer language is an interface between man and machine.
Machines execute sequences of instructions belonging to their instruction set.
Such instructions are rather simple and tightly bound to features of the machine hardware. Moreover, such a program would be very hard to decipher for a human examining it. So called high level computer languages are the solution. A language is a machine-independent way to specify the sequence of operations necessary to accomplish a task. A line in a high level language can embody powerful operations, and correspond to tens, or hundreds, of instructions at the machine level.