Module-A-Introduction

Programming Computers
Information
Languages and C Compilers

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Objectives
Programming Computers
Accidents
Software Development
Hardware

Information
Fundamental Units
Representations
Addressing Information
Program Instructions
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Objectives
Languages and C Compilers
Programming Languages
Why C as a First Language?
Compiling C Programs
Some Notable Features

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Programming Computers
Introduce the art of software development

"The most likely way for the world to be

destroyed, most experts agree, is by
accident. That's where we come in. We're
computer professionals. We cause
accidents." Nathaniel Borenstein (1991).

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Accidents
In May 2004, the Royal Bank of Canada informed the
public that some of its transactions had not been properly
reflected in its client balances. The bank faced a classaction suit for damages of $500 per customer and a
possible loss of $165 million in service fees.
In July 2004, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce
reported that its computer system had been affected by
glitches. The system had double dipped about 60,000
personal lines of credit.

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Accidents
In June 1996, the European Space Agency Ariane 5
maiden rocket self-destructed after going out of
control because of a software error.
In October 1992, the computer aided dispatch
system of the London Ambulance Service started
malfunctioning. In one case, the ambulance
arrived 11 hours late at a stroke victim's house - 5
hours after the caller had made their own way to
the hospital.

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Accidents
To minimize such accidents, we build quality into the
software that we develop. We design it for, amongst
other features:
Usability
Correctness
Maintainability
Understandability
Modifiability

Portability

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Accidents
We achieve quality through
robust and user-friendly interfaces
structured programming
comprehensive testing
internal documentation
standards compliance

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Software Development
The programs that we develop are simulations
of solutions to stated problems.
The process includes problem analysis,
algorithm design, program coding, program
testing and program maintenance.
A program is a set of instructions that
computer hardware will execute.

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Software Development

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Software Development Caricatures

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Hardware

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Hardware
Central Processing Unit

CPU memory is volatile - the contents of the

registers are lost as soon as power is turned
off.

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Hardware
Primary Memory
Primary memory holds the information accessed
by the CPU.
Primary memory is also volatile.
The popular term for primary memory is RAM
(Random Access Memory).

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Hardware
Devices
Include I/O devices such as a keyboard, a monitor
and a mouse
Storage devices such as a floppy drive, a hard
drive and a CD-ROM drive (secondary storage).
Each device interfaces with the system buses
through a device controller.

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Hardware
The most expensive and fastest memory registers - is reserved for the CPU.
CPU transfers information at less than 10
nanoseconds
primary memory transfers information at about 60
nanoseconds
a hard disk transfers information at about
12,000,000 nanoseconds

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Summary
Programming Computers
Accidents
Software Development
Hardware

Q&A
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Information
Summarize the low-level features of programming.

Program information consists of instructions and data.

How is this information stored?
What does a program instruction look like?
How do we make program instructions readable?

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Fundamental Units
John von Neumann selected binary (base 2)
digits as the EDVAC's fundamental unit.
The vast majority of modern computers
process and store information in binary digits.
We call a binary digit a bit.

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Fundamental Units
The fundamental
addressable unit of
primary memory is the
byte.
One byte consists of 2
nibbles. One nibble
consists of 4
consecutive bits.

Byte
Nibble
Nibble
Bit Bit Bit Bit Bit Bit Bit Bit
00000000 <- possibility 0
00000001 <- possibility 1
00000010 <- possibility 2
00000011 <- possibility 3
00000100 <- possibility 4
...
00111000 <- possibility 104
...
11111111 <- possibility 255

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Fundamental Units
The natural unit of the CPU is a word. A word
is the size of the general registers - the unit of
memory within the CPU.

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Representations
Hexadecimal Representation
Base 16: 0,1,..,9, A, B, C, D, E, F
Each hexadecimal digit represents 4 bits of
information.
The 0x prefix identifies the number as a
hexadecimal number: 0x5C

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Representations
Octal Representation
Base 8: 0,1,2,..,7
Set of 3 consecutive bits forms an octal digit
The prefix 0 identifies the number as an octal
number: 031

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Addressing Information
Each byte of primary memory has a unique
address, start from zero
Kilo or k (=1024): 1 Kilobyte = 1024 bytes
Mega or M (=1024k)
Giga or G (=1024M)
Tera or T (=1024G)
Peta or P (=1024T)
Exa or E (=1024P)
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Addressing Information
Addressible Memory
The maximum size of addressable primary
memory depends upon the size of the address
registers

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Program Instructions
Each program instruction consists of an
operation and operands
The CPU performs the operation on the values
stored as operands or on the values stored in
the operand addresses.
The addresses are either register names or
primary memory addresses

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Program Instructions
Assemblers

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Summary
Information
Fundamental Units
Representations
Addressing Information
Program Instructions

Q&A
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Languages and C Compilers

Use operating system utilities to edit, compile and run
programs
Programs that perform relatively simple tasks and
are written in assembly language contain a large
number of statements.
Assembly language is a low-level language, close to
the hardware.
To make our programs shorter, we use higher-level
languages.
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Programming Languages

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Programming Languages

5 generations:

Machine languages.
Assembly languages.
Third-generation languages. These are languages with
instructions that describe how a result is to be obtained
(C, Pascal, C++, Java).
Fourth-generation languages. These are languages with
instructions that describe what is to be done without
specifying how it is to be done (eg:SQL).
Fifth-generation languages are the closest to human
languages. They are used for artificial intelligence, fuzzy
sets, and neural networks (eg: Prolog, Matlab)

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Programming Languages
The higher the level, the closer to the human
languages and the further from native
machine languages
Each third generation language statement ~ 5-10
machine language statements.
Each fourth generation language ~ 30-40 machine
language statements.

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Interpreters and Compilers

When we code a program in a high level
language, we write source code. We translate
this code into machine language statements
using either
an interpreter, or
a compiler.

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Why C as a First Language?

C is one of the most popular languages in use
globally
Some reasons for learning programming using the C
language include:

C is English-like,
C is quite compact - has a small number of keywords,
A large number of C programs need to be maintained,
C is the lowest in level of the high-level languages,
C is faster and more powerful than other high-level
languages, and
The UNIX, Linux and Windows operating systems are
written in C and C++.
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Why C as a First Language?...

Speed
Language
Assembly

Time to Run
0.18 seconds

2.7 seconds

Basic

10 seconds

Comparative times for a Sieve of Eratosthenes test

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Compiling C Programs
/* My first program
*/
/* p_1.c
*/
/* Author your name here... */
/* Date
*/
main()
{
printf("This is Programming Fundamental\n");
}

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5/16/2010

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Compiling C Programs
Standards
The most recent standard to which C compiler
writers try to adhere is ANSI/ISO 9899-1999 or
C99 for short.
If we write our source code to this standard or
even better the earlier C89, we can expect our
code to compile on most platforms.

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Some Notable Features

Comments
/* */
We use comments to document our programs and
to enhance their readability. C compilers ignore
all comments.

Whitespace
We use whitespace to improve program
readability and to display the structure of our
program's logic. C compilers ignore all whitespace

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Some Notable Features

Case Sensitivity
C language is case sensitive.
C compilers treat the character 'A' as different
from the character 'a'

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Summary
Languages and C Compilers
Programming Languages
Why C as a First Language?
Compiling C Programs
Some Notable Features

Q&A
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