machine instructions

Perry sets her tale in modern-day Prague, focusing on Helen Franklin, a 42-year-old English exile, whose dull and drab existence is matched only by her banal job as a translator of, for example, washing machine instructions.

These layers that connect algorithms to devices are often termed a ‘software toolchain’, in which one layer feeds into another to form a chain of input–output transformations that can take a program written in a high-level language as the first input and produce, in the final output, the low-level machine instructions to execute on specific hardware.

Legal languages are nuanced and must be interpreted by trained lawyers; programming languages consist of unambiguous machine instructions.

Instead, it produces and distributes coded machine instructions.

Instead, they reuse existing subroutines and libraries, and leave the job of selecting specific machine instructions to a compiler program.