Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 1.2: Computers can understand only byte codes
How programming languages are different compared to natural languages humans use for
their communication with each other? A human brain is exposed to natural human lan-
guages from their early childhood and so their brains comprehend them well. After some
training, human brains can also understand programming languages. Programming lan-
guages are an intermediate language between a natural human language and the machine
readable byte codes. Programmers write computer programs in any programming. These
computer programs are then compiled using a compiler. The compiler converts the com-
puter programs into byte codes. The computer can understand these byte codes. Once you
execute this binary (byte codes) piece of code then computer will understand it and then
will perform a task (computation) based on the instruction written in the program.
Most programming languages define variable data types, computational operators, and
methods to write computer programs. You create variables to assign and hold some values
then perform some computation using operators and the result of these computations is
stored in some variables and this result can be displayed or to be used in some other compu-
tation. Methods are used to name a computer program. You can also pass values to a meth-
od. This property is used to break computation task over many methods. This has many
advantages. We will see all those advantages in later sections.
In object oriented programming we also use classes and objects. We will learn about classes
and objects in later sections.
