"Hello, World!

" program
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"Hello World" redirects here. For other uses, see Hello World (disambiguation).

C-language "Hello, World" source code. This first known "Hello, world" snippet from the seminal bookThe C
Programming Language originates from Brian Kernighan in the Bell Laboratories in 1974.[1]

A "Hello World!" program, written inJavaScript and executed in Firefox 31

CNC machining test in Perspex

A "Hello World!" message being displayed through long-exposure light painting with a moving strip of LED
lights

A "Hello, World!" program is a computer program that outputs "Hello, World!" on a display device,
oftenstandard output. Being a very simple program in most programming languages, it is often used

to illustrate the basic syntax for constructing a working program and getting it to run correctly on a
computer.[citation needed]
Contents
[hide]

1Purpose

2History

3Variations

4See also

5References

6External links

Purpose[edit]
This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to
reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2015)
A "Hello, world!" program is often used to introduce beginning programmers to a programming
language. In general, it is simple enough to be understood easily, especially with the guidance of a
teacher or a written guide.
In addition, "Hello world!" can be a useful sanity test to make sure that a
language's compiler, development environment, and run-time environment are correctly installed.
Configuring a complete programming toolchain from scratch to the point where even trivial programs
can be compiled and run can involve substantial amounts of work. For this reason, a simple program
is used first when testing a new tool chain.

A "Hello world!" program running on Sony's PlayStation Portable as a proof of concept.

"Hello world!" is also used by computer hackers as a proof of concept that arbitrary code can be
executed through an exploitwhere the system designers did not intend code to be executedfor
example, on Sony's PlayStation Portable. This is the first step in using homemade content ("home
brew") on such a device.

History[edit]

This section possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims
made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be
removed. (March 2015)
While small test programs existed since the development of programmable computers, the tradition
of using the phrase "Hello world!" as a test message was influenced by an example program in the
seminal book The C Programming Language[citation needed]. The example program from that book prints
" hello, world " (without capital letters or exclamation mark), and was inherited[citation needed] from a
1974 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum by Brian Kernighan,Programming in C: A Tutorial,
[1]
which contains the first known version:
#include <stdio.h>
main( )
{
printf("hello, world\n");
}

The C version was adapted[citation needed] from Kernighan's 1972 A Tutorial Introduction to the
Language B,[2] where the first known version of the program is found in an example used to illustrate
external variables:
main(){
extern a,b,c;
putchar(a); putchar(b); putchar(c); putchar('!*n');
}
a 'hell';
b 'o, w';
c 'orld';

The program prints " hello, world! " on the terminal, including a newline character. The phrase is
divided into multiple variables because in B, a character constant is limited to four ASCII characters.
The previous example in the tutorial printed " hi! " on the terminal, so the phrase " hello, world! "
was originally introduced as a slightly longer greeting that required several character constants for its
expression.
It is also claimed that[by whom?] "hello, world" originated instead with BCPL (1967).[3][unreliable source?]This claim is
supported by the archived notes of the inventors of BCPL, Prof. Brian Kernighan at Princeton and
Martin Richards at Cambridge.[4][unreliable source?]
For modern languages, the hello world program can vary in sophistication. For example, the Go
programming language introduced a multilingual hello world program,[5] Sun demonstrated
a Java hello world based on scalable vector graphics,[6] and the XL programming language features
a spinning Earth hello world using 3D graphics. [7] While some languages such
as Perl, Python or Ruby may need only a single statement to print "hello world", a lowlevel assembly languagemay require dozens of commands. Mark Guzdial and Elliot Soloway have

suggested that the "hello world" test message may be outdated now that graphics and sound can be
manipulated as easily as text.[8]

Variations[edit]
There are many variations on the punctuation and casing of the phrase. Variations include the
presence or absence of the comma and exclamation mark, and the capitalization of the 'H', both the
'H' and the 'W', or neither. Some languages are forced to implement different forms, such as " HELLO
WORLD! ", on systems that support only capital letters, while many "hello world" programs in esoteric
languages print out a slightly modified string. For example, the first non-trivial Malbolgeprogram
printed "HEllO WORld", this having been determined to be good enough.
There are variations in spirit, as well. Functional programming languages, like Lisp, ML and Haskell,
tend to substitute a factorial program for Hello World, as functional programming emphasizes
recursive techniques, whereas the original examples emphasize I/O, which violates the spirit of pure
functional programming by producing side effects. Languages otherwise capable of Hello World
(Assembly, C, VHDL) may also be used in embedded systems, where text output is either difficult
(requiring additional components or communication with another computer) or nonexistent. For
devices such as microcontrollers, field-programmable gate arrays, and CPLD's, "Hello, World" may
thus be substituted with a blinking LED, which demonstrates timing and interaction between
components.[9][10][11][12][13]
The Debian and Ubuntu Linux distributions provide the "hello world" program through
the apt packaging system; this allows users to simply type "apt-get install hello" for the program to
be installed, along with any software dependencies. While of itself useless, it serves as a sanity
check and a simple example to newcomers of how to install a package. It is significantly more useful
for developers, however, as it provides an example of how to create a .deb package, either
traditionally or using debhelper, and the version of hello used, GNU Hello, serves as an example of
how to write a GNU program.

See also[edit]
Computer Science portal
Computing portal
Computer programming portal

"99 Bottles Of Beer" as used in computer science

Foobar

Just another Perl hacker

List of basic computer science topics

Trabb Pardo-Knuth algorithm

References[edit]
1.

^ Jump up to:a b "Programming in C: A Tutorial" (PDF).

2.

Jump up^ "The Programming Language B" (PDF).

3.

Jump up^ BCPL, Jargon File

4.

Jump up^ "Stack Overflow".

5.

Jump up^ A Tutorial for the Go Programming Language. The Go

Programming Language. Retrieved July 26, 2011.

6.

Jump up^ Jolif, Christophe (January 2003). "Bringing SVG Power to

Java Applications". Sun Developer Network.

7.

Jump up^ de Dinechin, Christophe (July 24, 2010). "Hello world!".

Grenouille Bouillie.

8.

Jump up^ Teaching the Nintendo Generation to Program

9.

Jump up^ Silva, Mike (11 September 2013). "Introduction to

Microcontrollers - Hello World". EmbeddedRelated.com. Retrieved 19
May 2015.

10. Jump up^ George, Ligo. "Blinking LED using Atmega32

Microcontroller and Atmel Studio".electroSome. Retrieved 19
May 2015.
11. Jump up^ PT, Ranjeeth. "2. AVR Microcontrollers in Linux
HOWTO". The Linux Documentation Project. Retrieved 19 May 2015.
12. Jump up^ Andersson, Sven-ke (2 April 2012). "3.2 The first Altera
FPGA design". RTE. Realtime Embedded AB. Retrieved 19 May 2015.
13. Jump up^ Fabio, Adam (6 April 2014). "CPLD Tutorial: Learn
programmable logic the easy way". Hackaday. Retrieved 19
May 2015.

External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has
media related to Hello
World.

Rsler, Wolfram. "Hello World Collection". helloworldcollection.de.

"Hello world/Text". Rosetta Code.

Hosey, Peter. "Hello World, cut four ways: How to write good (and
bad) programs". boredzo.org.

"Unsung Heroes of IT / Part One: Brian

Kernighan". TheUnsungHeroesOfIT.com.

"HelloData: A Simple ADO Application". MSDN. Microsoft.

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