Common Intermediate Language (CIL, pronounced either "sil" or "kil") (formerly called Microsoft Intermediate Language or MSIL) is the lowest-level human-readable programming language in the Common Language Infrastructure and in the .NET Framework. Languages which target the .NET Framework compile to CIL, which is assembled into bytecode. CIL is an object-oriented assembly language, and is entirely stack-based. It is executed by a virtual machine