Instruction

An instruction is something that we tell a computer to do.

When we talk to someone who speaks Hindi but not English, we must talk to them in Hindi, not English. Likewise, an instruction is a command we give to the computer in its own language.

What can an Instruction do?

An instruction can do many things. It typically involves the following :-

• Fetch some information from a memory location or register
• Perform some operation or comparison with this information
• Either store the result of this somewhere, or make some decision based on it

Instruction Set

There is a finite amount of words in any language. From these hundreds of thousands of words, we use a minimal amount (in the thousands) to describe most of the things we communicate in our day-to-day lives. Likewise, an instruction set is a (preferably but not necessarily) minimal set of words that form the language used by a computer.