Language primitive

A primitive is the smallest 'unit of processing' available to a programmer of a given machine, or can be an atomic element of an expression in a language.

A machine instruction, usually generated by an assembler program, is often considered the smallest unit of processing although this is not always the case.

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 higher semantic 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, before finally Some HLL statements, particularly those involving loops, can generate thousands or even millions of primitives in a low-level programming language (LLL), which comprise the genuine instruction path length the processor has to execute at the lowest level.

[1][2][3] An interpreted language statement has similarities to the HLL primitives, but with a further added layer.