How Do They Do That?

How do people make simple programs?

 

Usually people start off with displaying a simple message such as Hello World.

Put simply, programs are written in a language that can be interpreted or compiled into something that when executed does what you want.

For example, to create a "simple program" to display "Hello World" in a UNIX screen you would enter the following UNIX command at the command prompt:

echo "Hello World"

The same works at an MS-DOS prompt in MS Windows. Then you can build up scripts with these commands to create an interpretative program.

However, with interpretative programs you are limited and performance can be very poor. The solution here is to create a program in a computer language that uses a compiler, e.g., C, C++, FORTRAN, etc..

For compiler language, you write your code in this language pass it through a compiler to create an executable program that does what you want.

This is in a nutshell is a very basic introduction in creating a "simple program".