Chapter 1 - Programming Basics

Dilbert

To be a good brogrammer one needs to understand the way a computer 'thinks'. All though you will rarely have to define things as basically as this, having some idea is important.

The first thing you'll have to realize is that a computer lacks grammatics and only have a vocabulary and different word order, and it doesn't even know many words. One can however teach a computer new 'words'. If the compuer knew, for instance, SAY and that meant it should say something one could adress it to do so with the words:

SAY 'Hello world!'

This would then cause the computer, quite naturally, to say 'Hello world'. This could be defined as greeting the world... which we could teach our computer is simply GREETING, like so:

GREETING

This would now also cause the computer to say 'Hello World!'.

Most programming 'commands' are such shortenings of a list of other, simplier commands. These commands are in their turn short for other commands and so on until they are the 'ones' and 'zeroes' you've probably heard of.

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