Intro to Programming

Programming a computer is much like riding a bike - it's a little tricky at first but once you have got the hang of it, it is with you for the rest of your life.

A computer program is no more than a list of instructions for a computer to carry out. At the computer level, the instructions are a sequence of 1s and 0s that are processed by the CPU. This low level representation is called machine language. Writing programs in machine language is a tedious and unpleaseant task at best. Since each machine has its own language, programs written for one type of computer cannot be moved to another and in order to pogram for many computers, you would need to know just as many machine languages!

To help make programming computers as easy as it is today, programming languages were developed. A programming language is a set of commands, similar in form and usage to english, that can be converted into machine code for a computer to execute. The langauge itself is machine independent. This means that programs written for one machine can easily be transported to another machine. Since the program text, or code, is not transported in machine language, it does need to be converted into the language of a particular computer. A compiler or interpreter accomplishes this task. A compiler converts the program code directly into a program that can run on a machine while an interpreter prompts the programmer for commands an exectues them one at a time.

There are many different programming languages available for developing applications. Most common are C/C++, FORTRAN and LISP. FORTRAN, from FORmula TRANSlator, is one of the oldest programming langages still around. It is mainly used in scientific and mathematical programming but is losing popualarity with the proliferation of C. LISP, LISt Processing, is a powerful language for handling very abstract simulation and data types. It is used mostly in artificial intelligence (AI). C and C++ are the most widely used langauges today. Originally designed as an programming interface to an early version of Unix by Denis Ritchie, C's power was quickly realized and its popularity exploded as the language of choice for serious software development. C++ is a superset of C, a language that has all the capabilities plus the added capability of object implementation.