Common Intermediate Language

Common Intermediate Language (CIL, pronounced either "sil" or "kil") (formerly called Microsoft Intermediate Language or MSIL) is the lowest-level human-readable programming language defined by the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) specification and is used by the .NET Framework and Mono. Languages which target a CLI-compatible runtime environment compile to CIL, which is assembled into an object code that has a bytecode-style format. CIL is an object-oriented assembly language, and is entirely stack-based. Its bytecode is translated into native code or executed by a virtual machine.

CIL was originally known as Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) during the beta releases of the .NET languages. Due to standardization of C# and the Common Language Infrastructure, the bytecode is now officially known as CIL.

Read more about Common Intermediate Language:  General Information, Instructions, Computational Model, Example, Generation

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