Programming in Unix
Introduction to Sociology

In today’s society, computers have played a major part of how corporations and individuals conduct business. In a sense, they have made some of the hardest tasks fairly easy by the click of a button or by typing a certain command. Computer programs perform both simple and complex calculations with user seeing the end result. However, computer programs have to be written by computer programmers. To understand how programs work, you must consider how the computer interprets the information entered by the programmer. “A program is a set of instructions that guide the computer in performing its basic and logical arithmetic operations (Afzal, 2008, p. 349).” These programs have to be written in a certain language for the computer to interpret. There are several types of languages used to write programs. Although the programmer types words and numbers to perform these mathematical and logical calculations, the computer sees only 1’s and 0’s. This is called machine language. There is also assembler language. “Instead of a series of zeros and ones, assembler language uses some recognized symbols, called mnemonics (memory aids), to represent instructions (Afzal, 2008, p. 349).” High level language is the language in which the programmer desires to write in such as Pascal, C++, C, and Java to name a few. To translate a high level language to machine language, a compiler or an interpreter must be used. The first step to writing a program is to draw a diagram of how you want your program to work. This should document from start to finish of how you want the program to work. This should be done prior to typing any type of commands in a program.
When programming, the programmer has to store certain information and values into the memory. This is accomplished through variables. Unix supports two types of