by Matthias Felleisen.
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| Last modified on June 18, 1997 by Matthias Felleisen. | | |
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| Principles of Programming and Computing |
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| Last modified on June 18, 1997 by Matthias Felleisen. | | |
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| Principles of Programming and Computing |
 | What are the Principles of Computing? |
| Computer scientists study all aspects of programs. They are most prominently concerned with the principles of program construction (an engineering activity), with methods to reason about a program's evaluation (a mathematical or logical activity), and with observing physical attributes (a scientific activity). Programmers must learn as much as possible about these things, if they want to be more than mere typists. |
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| Last modified on June 18, 1997 by Matthias Felleisen. | | |
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| Principles of Programming and Computing |
 | What are the Principles of Computing? |
| What is the Essence of a Program? |
| A simple program (or piece of a program) is a "box" that consumes and produces information. Consumption and production can take many forms: keyboard input, optical, acoustic, etc. While the particular form of consumption and production may be important for making computers relevant, they are not important to understand the essence of a program. We therefore ignore input and output actions and focus instead on the representation of information as data and at the description of programs as "rules" that construct new data from given data. |
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| Last modified on June 18, 1997 by Matthias Felleisen. | | |
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| Principles of Programming and Computing |
| What are the Principles of Computing? |
| What is the Essence of a Program? |
| How about the Computer? |
| Once we know how to construct such programs, how to determine their logical behavior, and how to observe their basic characteristics, we will study how a computer represents programs and data at the most basic level and how it evaluates programs. The two models of computing are quite different. The conceptual gap raises a number of questions, all of which, in turn, describe the heart of computer science. |
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