LEARNINGS OF THE WEEK (TAGARO)

LEARNINGS OF THE WEEK

By: Sharra Mae S. Tagaro IV- Rizal

SOFTWARE

- is a general term used to describe a collection of computer programs, procedures and documentation that perform some tasks on a computer system.

Kinds of system software

1. Application software- allows end users to accomplish one or more specific (non-computer related) tasks. Typical applications include industrial automation, business software, educational software, medical software, databases, and computer games. Businesses are probably the biggest users of application software, but almost every field of human activity now uses some form of application software.

2. Operating system- is the software component of a computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the resources of the computer. The operating system acts as a host for application programs that are run on the machine. As a host, one of the purposes of an operating system is to handle the details of the operation of the hardware. This relieves application programs from having to manage these details and makes it easier to write applications. Almost all computers, including hand-held computers, desktop computers, supercomputers, and even modern video game consoles, use an operating system of some type. Some of the oldest models may however use an embedded OS, that may be contained on a compact disk or other storage device.

3. Programming languages- A language used to write instructions for the computer. It lets the programmer express data processing in a symbolic manner without regard to machine-specific details.

A.Machine language- For the first machines in the 1940s, programmers had no choice but to write in the sequences of digits that the computer executed. For example, assume we want to compute the absolute value of A + B − C, where A is the value at machine address 3012, B is the value at address 3013, and C is the value at address 3014, and then store this value at address 3015.

B.Assembly languages- Since each component of a program stands for an object that the programmer understands, using its name rather than numbers should make it easier to program. By naming all locations with easy-to-remember names, and by using symbolic names for machine instructions, some of the difficulties of machine programming can be eliminated. A relatively simple program called an assembler converts this symbolic notation into an equivalent machine language program.

C.High- level languages- The first programming languages were developed in the late 1950s. The concept was that if we want to compute A + B − C, and store the result in a memory location called D, all we had to do was write D = A + B − C and let a computer program, the compiler, convert that into the sequences of numbers that the computer could execute. FORTRAN (an acronym for Formula Translation) was the first major language in this period.

FORTRAN statements were patterned after mathematical notation. In mathematics the = symbol implies that both sides of the equation have the same value. However, in FORTRAN and some other languages, the equal sign is known as the assignment operator. The action carried out by the computer when it encounters this operator is, “Make the variable named on the left of the equal sign have the same value as the expression on the right.” Because of this, in some early languages the statement would have been written as −D → D to imply movement or change, but the use of → as an assignment operator has all but disappeared.