Many people nowadays are looking to learn computer programming basics as it is a profession on the rise everywhere in the world. New software companies are springing up every day and they are looking for people to write their programs, maintain their databases and to think of new ideas.
While the industry may be a fast moving one, the basics of computer programming always remain the same. First of all, computers can only understand binary code. This means that it can only understand things which are represented in zeros and ones. It cannot understand anything else.
This is the lowest level of this there is and is the most difficult for human beings to use because it is not real to us.
Other computer languages have been developed from this basic low level language of computer programming. Assembly languages were developed and they use mnemonics. Assembly languages are easier to use than binary digits but are still quite difficult because the language is very detached from the languages that human beings use, one of the first things that you are going to learn when you begin your computer programmer training.
As an improvement the next development was of procedural languages. This included FORTRAN COBOL and BASIC which stood for beginners all-purpose symbolic instruction code. It describes step by step exactly the procedure requirements of the problem. The problem with procedural programming was that it was they did not allow code re-use. Object orientated languages where introduced to solve this problem. An object contains data and methods were the data can only be accessed through the objects methods.
Eventually, even though all of these languages are easier to use for humans, they have to be converted into machine code for the machine to be able to use it. This is done using two types of programs. One type of program that can carry out this function of converting higher level languages into binary code is called an interpreter.
With an interpreter, the conversion from a high level language to a low level language is done one line at a time. Each instruction is fed into the translator and then the whole line is executed one line at a time. Basic is an example of an interpreted language. This is obviously quite slow and that is the main disadvantage of using an interpreter.
The main advantage though is that an interpreter is a great tool to use for debugging. That is when you have made an error in your programming you can easily spot where this error has occurred because it will the program will return an error on the line of code where the error is.
The other tool that can be used for conversions is a compiler. A compiler simply translates the whole program from a high level language to a low level language in one go. The advantage of this is obvious. It will be much quicker to convert than simply using an interpreter to convert the code. The disadvantage is that it is much more difficult to ascertain where an error has occurred when there is one.
Many languages now use both compilers and interpreters nowadays, so you can get a warning of an error message as you are typing out the code. So now that you know a little more about computer programming training, and you will not be in the complete dark when you start to begin classes for a computer programmer.
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