Programming languages

  • Programming language = an artificial language designed to convey commands unambigously to a (dumb) machine (computer)

  • A programming language has a set of syntax rules to construct "commands"

  • There are 3 types of commands/statements in a procedural programming language:

      1. Assignment statement

      2. Selection (if, if-else) statement

      3. Loop (while, for, do-while) statement

  • These 3 types of statements are necessary and sufficient to make a programming languae Turing-complete ()

      • A Turing Complete machine can -- given enough time and memory -- solve any computational problem, no matter how complex.