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Computer programming or coding is the composition of sequences of instructions, called programs, that computers can follow to perform tasks. [1] [2] It involves designing and implementing algorithms, step-by-step specifications of procedures, by writing code in one or more programming languages.
In computer science, executable code, an executable file, or an executable program, sometimes simply referred to as an executable or binary, causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instructions", [2] as opposed to a data file that must be interpreted by an interpreter to be functional.
A computer program in its human-readable form is called source code. Source code needs another computer program to execute because computers can only execute their native machine instructions. Therefore, source code may be translated to machine instructions using a compiler written for the language.
Composition must be distinguished from subtyping, which is the process of adding detail to a general data type to create a more specific data type. For instance, cars may be a specific type of vehicle: car is a vehicle. Subtyping doesn't describe a relationship between different objects, but instead, says that objects of a type are ...
Software architecture is the set of structures needed to reason about a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems. Each structure comprises software elements, relations among them, and properties of both elements and relations.
In early 1960s computers, main memory was expensive and very limited, even on mainframes. Minimizing the size of a program to make sure it would fit in the limited memory was often central. Thus the size of the instructions needed to perform a particular task, the code density, was an important characteristic of any instruction set. It remained ...
The idea of auto-generating documentation is attractive to programmers for various reasons. For example, because it is extracted from the source code itself (for example, through comments), the programmer can write it while referring to the code, and use the same tools used to create the source code to make the documentation. This makes it much ...
External code can only use an object by calling a specific instance method with a certain set of input parameters, reading an instance variable, or writing to an instance variable. A program may create many instances of objects as it runs, which operate independently.