A few years ago I assembled an inventory of the fundamental operations in a digital computer. The purpose was to clear up confusion about the proposed Program level of perception.
All programming languages are merely human-friendly language-like intermediary forms which are transformed to these fundamental operations. The transforming is done by a compiler, by a (compiled) interpreter, or the like.
Broadly, there are arithmetic operations, logic operations, and operations related to storage, input, and output. Those of greatest interest here are the Boolean logic operations, of which the primitive set are AND, OR, and NOT. All the other Boolean operators can be built from (or decomposed to) combinations of these.
Texts on this, on switching theory, and so forth, carry this down to switching of bits in bytes, at the level of machine code. Here’s an example text.
I abandoned this hapless project because there is such a mismatch between bit-switching in a digital computer and the analog interactions of neurons.
Early in the development of computer ‘science’ some sort of demonstration of the computational equivalence of analog and digital computing led to the abandonment of the former, in a “why bother” spirit as the power of the latter was rapidly increasing. Some discussion here.
There is now a growing swing back. Discussion here and here, for example.
A proper comparison would be to the operations and functions in an analog computer. I didn’t proceed to that. I have read the claim that programming languages for analog computers were never developed because there were no general-purpose analog computers, they were all purpose-built. Claude Shannon did develop a mathematical model for a general-purpose analog computer (GPAC) in 1941. Here’s a relevant Wikipedia article.
“Shannon defined the GPAC as an analog circuit consisting of five types of units: adders (which add their inputs), multipliers (which multiply their inputs), integrators, constant units (which always output the value 1), and constant multipliers (which always multiply their input by a fixed constant k). More recently, and for simplicity, the GPAC has instead been defined using the equivalent four types of units: adders, multipliers, integrators and real constant units (which always output the value k, for some fixed real number k).”
Interesting bit of discussion here with a proposal that sounds like reorganization.