tRANSLATOr:

A tranlator is some one that can listen to the first speaker speak in an

other language and then say what the first speaker said in a language that can be understood on behalf of some one that doesnt under stand the language of the first speaker. Translators are also available that do this with text as in the Yahoo babel fish text translator.

Assembler: An assembler is a program that takes basic

computer instructions and converts them into a pattern of bits that the computer's processor can use to perform its basic operations. Some people call these instructions assembler language and others use the term assembly language.

program that executes instructions written in a high-level language. There are two ways to run programs written in a high-level language. The most common is to compile the program; the other method is to pass the program through an interpreter. An interpreter translates high-level instructions into an intermediate form, which it then executes. In contrast, a compiler translates high-level instructions directly into machine language. Compiled programs generally run faster than interpreted programs. The advantage of an interpreter, however, is that it does not need to go through the compilation stage during which machine instructions are generated. This process can be timeconsuming if the program is long. The interpreter, on the other hand, can immediately execute high-level programs. For this reason, interpreters are sometimes used during the development of a program, when a programmer wants to add small sections at a time and test them quickly. In addition, interpreters are often used in education because they allow students to program interactively. Both interpreters and compilers are available for most high-level languages. However, BASIC and LISP are especially designed to be executed by an interpreter. In addition, page description languages, such as PostScript, use an interpreter. Every PostScript printer, for example, has a built-in interpreter that executes PostScript instructions.

Interpreter:

Compiler

: A compiler is a program that translates human

readable source code into computer executable machine code. To do this successfully the human readable code must comply with the syntax rules of whichever programming language it is written in. The compiler is only a program and cannot fix your programs for you. If you make a mistake, you have to correct the syntax or it won't compile.

Constant:

In computer programming, a constant is a special kind of variable whose value

cannot typically be altered by the program during its execution (though in some cases this can be circumvented, e.g. using self-modifying code). Many programming languages make an explicit syntactic distinction between constant and variable symbols. Although a constant's value is specified only once, a constant may be referenced many times in a program. Using a constant instead of specifying a value multiple times in the program can not only simplify code maintenance, but it can also supply a meaningful name for it and consolidate such constant bindings to a standard code location

Variable:
variables play an important role in computer programming because they enable programmers to write flexible programs. Rather than entering datadirectly into a program, a programmer can use variables to represent the data. Then, when the program is executed, the variables are replaced with real data. This makes it possible for the same program to process different sets of data. Every variable has a name, called the variable name, and a data type. A variable's data type indicates what sort of value the variable represents, such as whether it is an integer, a floating-point number, or a character. The opposite of a variable is a constant. Constants are values that never change. Because of their inflexibility, constants are used less often than variables in programming.

INTERGER: In computer science, the term integer is used to refer to any

data type that can represent some subset of the mathematical integers. These are also known as integral data types. In the context of Tcl, where everything is a string, dealing with integers can be an odd business indeed.

I have been recently working on a system that must interface between Tcl scripts and other programs implemented in other languages across a network. Some of the values that need to be communicated need to meet certain data type restrictions of other languages at the other end. This means that values that are integers inside of Tcl need to be checked against those restrictions to ensure that they are acceptable. (This is part of checking user inputs against validation criteria.) Some of these restrictions were interesting to enforce, and I'm wondering if there are any tricks to this that I missed. The external data types of interest: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. unsigned byte unsigned short (16 bits) signed word (32 bits) unsigned word (32 bits) unsigned long (64 bits)

String:

computer programming, a string is traditionally a sequence of characters, either as a

literal constant or as some kind of variable. The latter may allow its elements to be mutated and/or the length changed, or it may be fixed (after creation). A string is generally understood as a data type and is often implemented as a byte (or word) array that stores a sequence of elements, typically characters, using some character encoding. A string may also denote more general array data types and/or other sequential data types and structures; terms such as byte string, or more general, string of datatype, or datatype-string, are sometimes used to denote strings in which the stored data does not (necessarily) represent text. Depending on programming language and/or precise datatype used, a variable declared to be a string may either cause storage in memory to be statically allocated for a predetermined max length, or it may employ dynamic allocation to allow it to hold chronologically variable number of elements. When a string appears literally in source code, it is known as a string literal and has a representation that denotes it as such.