Англ. Язык (Карпеева) / PROGRAMMING

PROGRAMMING * A computer is a machine for solving mathematical problems. Since computers are sometimes called thinking machines or robots that can think, these names lead to misunderstanding. It is true that no machine can really think in the usual sense, but the computers do many important and wonderful things besides then solving complex mathematical problems, computers can predict the paths of satellites, guide ballistic missiles in flight and so on. Before the computer can do any work, someone must give it a programmer in the language which it is able to understand. It is a programmer who translates the calculation into a number of instructions based on the kinds of switching. This work requires attention, and the solving of difficult problems takes time usually much longer than the calculation itself. The programmer must be a language expert. The languages he uses are not all spoken languages like Russian, English or French. Some of them are universal languages understood by scientists and engineers all over the world. These are mathematics and the language of reasoning, that is logic. May be you don’t consider mathematics to be a language but such is really the case. It is the means used by scientists for communicating with each other. In other words, the programmer’s work consists in translating the details of a problem into a language the machine can understand and work with. In addition to it, the programmer must be able to study, to analyze, and to plan problems. Understanding of programming fundamentals is important for understanding the compilation process. After finding out that a computer should do, the engineer can start to design the machine A modern automatic electronic computer is often called a data processing system We know of its carrying my out a long series of arithmetic and logical• operations on the basis of instructions include such work as sorting, selecting, comparing and matching various kinds of information. A computer can work as a translator. Each year, millions of reports on scientific research are published, a great number of them being in foreign language. In this mass of Russian. English and French data there are clues to interplanetary flights, nuclear power, more powerful batteries. Computers have been put to work for translating these scientific publications. For doing translations, every word in a Russian dictionary is listed on tape under a code number or address. The English, French or German equivalents for each word are given in the same number or address. Then, for translating from English into Russian, for example, a tape with the English code numbers is fed into the machine, which matches the numbers and prints out the Russian translation. The computer is capable of making over a thousand translations a day.