These simply executed the sequence commands batch

What is programming? 08/11/2004

What is Programming?

At the very simplest level it consists of issuing a sequence of commands to a computer to achieve an objective. In the Microsoft world MS DOS users used to create text files with lists of commands called BAT files. These simply executed the sequence of commands as a BATCH, hence the name.

You can still produce these in Windows environments today but in practice they are rarely seen.

Note: Users of Linux or other operating systems have their own versions of these files often known as shell scripts. Unix shell scripts are much more powerful than DOS BAT files, and support most of the programming techniques that we will be discussing in this course.

Let me say that again

What is programming? 08/11/2004

This was just as well because at the same time users were inventing ever more complex jobs for computers to solve! This competition between the computer scientists and the users is still going on and new languages keep on appearing. This makes programming interesting but also makes it important that as a programmer you understand the concepts of programming as well as the pragmatics of doing it in one particular language.

I'll discuss some of those common concepts next, but we will keep coming back to them as we go through the course.