programming fundamentals

i have recieved letters from visitors who told me they couldn't understand what i wrote in the visual basic tutorials, and they asked me to re-explain them in detail.

i suppose the greatest problem here lies in the basic knowledge of program flow and structure. i actually planned to cover this topic in the VB tutorials, but i seems that it is essential to introduce them here first. if you have understanding of how a program works, then you can skip this article. but do read on to clear things up.

programs are actually made up of lines of code. the compiler, the "person" in the computer who knows how to interpret computer languages, will carry out the instructions given by the code (writtened by the programmer), line by line from top to bottom.

the loads of symbols and alphabets that are not english are the codes or the language for a particular computer language (gosh! what am i saying?), and they are known as the keywords and functions of the programming language. as such, all programming languages are different, making life difficult.

no matter how different they are, they cannot run from a few basic, yet important, concept and structure. as such (again) having learned any language will give you advantage when you learn another.

what are the commons?

variables: a variable is a space/memory allocated for a data to be stored. this data or value could be the highscore of a game, the position of a pawn or the total amount of money spent online.

arrays: an array is like a cupboard, and in the cupboard, there are lots of compartments. you can define the array to contain 10(or any number) compartments and each stores an object , value, data, just like the variable.

functions: a function is a fixed set of procedure that does something. it only does something when the program calls for it. a function can accept parameters, which are values or data that the function works on. but they can also do without parameters. a function is wrriten by the programmer. could be a function calculating how many days to your birthday.

event handlers: though not obvious to realise one in certain programming languages, there is. like a function, carries out a procedure when called. but it is called by the user of the program, not the program or the programmer. such handlers can handle events like a mouse click or a key press.

there are other minor similarities, but i am not going to carry on. you'll read them in the VB tuorials and future ones.

so what we learn in programming languages?

we learn the keywords in a certain language, then understand how to manipulate them to give a result we want -- the true difficult part. but as i always say, nothing is too difficult.