Introduction to computers and programming  (Page 4/5)

One of the more tangible results of this research was the development of the Pascal programming language by Niklaus Wirth in 1971. Pascal was designed for teaching structured programming in academic environments and rapidly became the preferred programming languages in most universities.

In the 1980s, there is a revolution brewing in the software community: object- oriented programming . Objects are essentially reusable software components that model items in the real world. Software developers are discovering that using a modular, object-oriented design and implementation approach can make software development groups much more productive than with previous popular programming techniques such as structured programming.

Object-oriented programming refers to the creation of reusable software objects that can be easily incorporated into another program. An object is programming code and data that can be treated as an individual unit or component. Data refers to information contained within variables, constants, or other types of storage structures. The procedures associated with an object are referred as functions or methods . Variables that are associated with an object are referred to as properties or attributes . Object-oriented programming allows programmers to use programming objects that they have written themselves or that have been written by others.

Problem solution and software development

No matter what field of work you choose, you may have to solve problems. Many of these can be solved quickly and easily. Still others require considerable planning and forethought if the solution is to be appropriate and efficient.

Creating a program is no different because a program is a solution developed to solve a particular problem. As such, writing a program is almost the last step in a process of first determining what the problem is and the method that will be used to solve the problem.

One technique used by professional software developers for understanding the problem that is being solved and for creating an effective and appropriate software solution is called the software development procedure. The procedure consists of three overlapping phases

- Development and Design

- Documentation

- Maintenance

As a discipline, software engineering is concerned with creating readable, efficient, reliable, and maintainable programs and systems.

Phase i: development and design

The first phase consists of four steps:

1. analyze the problem

This step is required to ensure that the problem is clearly defined and understood. The person doing the analysis has to analyze the problem requirements in order to understand what the program must do, what outputs are required and what inputs are needed. Understanding the problem is very important. Do not start to solve the problem until you have understood clearly the problem.

2. develop a solution

Programming is all about solving problems. In this step,

you have to develop an algorithm to solve a given problem. Algorithm is a sequence of steps that describes how the data are to be processed to produce the desired outputs.