Programming fundamentals

In this post lets discus some of the programming fundamentals.

What is a computer?

When our instructor asked the same question in our class there were dozens of answers were arising.

It is a machine, where we can save data.

It is an electronic machine that simplify our work.

Were some of the common answers.

But we could say Computer is a programmable machine. This means it can execute a programmed list of instructions and respond to new instructions that it is given.

And the main function that a computer does is to process a set of data and make it to a valuable information. 

Computer is a machine and it doesn’t know any humans language. As we discussed earlier we have to give the instructions to the computer to make the things happen.

Compilers and Interpreters are the components that help us to fulfil the task. We know languages, But if any time comes to speak with a person who doesn’t know any of our language we could use a person who could speak both of our language to translate the conversation. The same job is done by compilers and interpreters. It stands between us and the machine, which is a computer, and translate our commands and instructions.

What are interpreters and compilers?

Although both are doing the same thing there are several differences between them.

Translation

Interpreter translates the code statement by statement. But compilers translates the whole code at once.

Time

To analyze the code Interpreter take a short time, While compiler take a long time. But to execute the code compiler is faster than interpreter.

Memory

When we talk about memory interpreters does a good job, because compilers read the whole source code into an object code. So compilers consume memory. But interpreters doesn’t create any object code, so interpreters are memory efficient.

Debugging

Debugging is correcting the errors in a code. Interpreters stop the execution when the first error found. So it will easy to debug, But Compilers read the whole document and states all errors so difficult to debug, comparing to interpreters.

Languages

Python, Ruby and some other languages use interpreters. C, C++ use compilers.

**Some languages use compilers and interpreters both.

I hope you may get some knowledge about interpreters and compilers. 

In the next post we shall discuss about programing language