What Is a Program?

A program is a sequence of instructions that specifies how to perform a computation. The computation might be something mathematical, like solving a system of equations or finding the roots of a polynomial, but it can also be a symbolic computation, like searching and replacing text in a document or (strangely enough) compiling a program.

The instructions (or commands, or statements) look different in different programming languages, but there are a few basic functions that appear in just about every language:

input

Get data from the keyboard, or a file, or some other device.

output

Display data on the screen or send data to a file or other device.

math

Perform basic mathematical operations like addition and multiplication.

testing

Check for certain conditions and execute the appropriate sequence of statements.

repetition

Perform some action repeatedly, usually with some variation.

Believe it or not, that's pretty much all there is to it. Every program you've ever used, no matter how complicated, is made up of functions that look more or less like these. Thus, one way to describe programming is the process of breaking a large, complex task up into smaller and smaller subtasks until eventually the subtasks are simple enough to be performed with one of these simple functions.