Computer programming is the act of composing the selected programming language's elements in the order that will cause the desired effect. The effect could be different in every specific case – it's up to the programmer's imagination, knowledge and experience.
Of course, such a composition has to be correct in many senses:
- alphabetically : a program needs to be written in a recognizable script, such as Roman, Cyrillic, etc.
- lexically : each programming language has its dictionary and you need to master it; thankfully, it's much simpler and smaller than the dictionary of any natural language
- syntactically : each language has its rules and they must be obeyed
- semantically :the program has to make sense
Unfortunately, a programmer can also make mistakes with each of the above four senses. Each of them can cause the program to become completely useless.
Let's assume that you've successfully written a program. How do we persuade the computer to execute it? You have to render your program into machine language. Luckily, the translation can be done by a computer itself, making the whole process fast and efficient.
There are two different ways of transforming a program from a high-level programming language into machine language:
COMPILATION - the source program is translated once (however, this act must be repeated each time you modify the source code) by getting a file (e.g., an .exe file if the code is intended to be run under MS Windows) containing the machine code; now you can distribute the file worldwide; the program that performs this translation is called a compiler or translator;
INTERPRETATION - you (or any user of the code) can translate the source program each time it has to be run; the program performing this kind of transformation is called an interpreter, as it interprets the code every time it is intended to be executed; it also means that you cannot just distribute the source code as-is, because the end-user also needs the interpreter to execute it.
Due to some very fundamental reasons, a particular high-level programming language is designed to fall into one of these two categories.
There are very few languages that can be both compiled and interpreted. Usually, a programming language is projected with this factor in its constructors' minds - will it be compiled or interpreted?
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