Chapter 1. Introduction
1. Babbage’s Analytical Engine introduced the concept of programming to computing. 2. Augusta Ada Byron is generally recognized as the first programmer. The U.S. Department of Defense named the Ada programming language in her honor. 3. The heart of von Neumann architecture is the stored-programming concept, in which both data and programming instructions are stored in the same memory system. 4. Hardware is tangible and comprises the physical parts of a computer; software is intangible and consists of the programs the computer executes. 5. The abstract concept that forms the core of computer science is problem-solving. 6. For a solution technique to be an algorithm, it must be • Clearly and unambiguously defined • Effective, in the sense that its steps are executable • Finite, in the sense that it terminates after a bounded number of steps 7. Algorithmic design refers to the process of designing a solution strategy to fit a particular problem; coding refers to the generally simpler task of representing that solution strategy in a programming language. 8. A higher-level language is a programming language that is designed to be independent of the particular characteristics that differentiate computers and to work instead with general algorithmic concepts that can be implemented on any computer system. The higher-level language used in this text is called Java. 9. Each type of computer has its own machine language, which is different from that used in other computers. The compiler acts as a translator from the higher-level language into the machine language used for a specific machine. 10. A source file contains the actual text of a program and is designed to be edited by people. An object file is created by the compiler and contains a machine-language representation of the program. Most programmers never work directly with object files. 11. A syntax error is a violation of the grammatical rules of the programming