Introduction to C++

Programming languages are similar to human languages. They consist of words (quite few), punctuation marks, mathematical operations, and have writing rules. Programs running on any computer have been written in a programming language. There are numerous programming languages, such as C, C++, Pascal, Java, Python, PHP, Javascript, etc.

A program written in a programming language is called source code and needs to be translated into a language understood by the processor, called machine code, or executable program. For certain programming languages, the translation process is called compilation (as in the case of C, C++, Pascal, etc.), while for other languages (PHP, Python, Javascript, etc.) the translation process is called interpretation. The translation is done by a specialized program called a compiler or interpreter.

Example of C++ Code

How do we write a C++ program? We need at least a text editor for writing the source and a C++ compiler. Although the source file can be created with any text editor, most of the time we use an IDE. A widely used IDE for C/C++ is Code::Blocks or Visual Studio.

An example of C++ code would be as follows: Try it!

        // A simple program in C++
          #include < iostream >
          using namespace std;
          int main()
          {
              cout << "Hello, world!" << endl;
              return 0;
          }