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What Can a Program Do?

As mentioned in the previous section, a program is a sequence of instructions. What can a program do, then?

A program does exactly what the programmer specifies. A sophisticated program written by an experienced programmer can do a lot (correctly), a half-baked program written by a beginner is likely to do simple tasks wrong.

Everything that a computer does is the result of executing one or more programs. This should give you some idea of what kind of complicated tasks can be done by a program. In this class, however, we will focus more on simple programs that are more educational than practical.


Tak Auyeung 2003-12-03