ENGINEER 1D04 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Programming Paradigm, Scientific Notation, Floating Point
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Eng1d04 lecture 2 fundamentals of programming languages. What do computers do: store and manipulate information. What determines the behaviour of a computer: a sequence of instructions called the program. Why are computers so useful: hardware: enables massive amounts of data to be stored and manipulated with great speed and accuracy, software: provides the means to control the behaviour of the hardware with extraordinary power and flexibility. Why python: python is a modern, multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language with a large standard library. It has a large, worldwide, growing user community: python is highly accessible and easy to use. It can be used well beyond eng 1d04. Values: values are information (called data) stored and manipulated by computer programs. Examples: booleans: represent the truth-values true and false, machine integers: represent small integers, floating point numbers: represent rational numbers in scientific notation, strings: represent sequences of characters, lists: represent sequences of values, functions: represent mathematical functions.