12 Common Phrases You Should Know in Programming

Before we talk about these terms, let us understand why all the programming languages share these phrases.

The word programming in computer science is the process of performing a particular calculation, commonly by designing/building an executable computer program.

Computer Programming involves tasks such as research, developing and profiling algorithms accurately, resource consumption (displaying the result to the user or using it to perform another task).

And finally, programming is also an act of implementing algorithms (i.e., making sure the code works).

With these features of computer programming, it is clear that all programming languages need to follow a strategic pattern (regardless of how complex the language maybe).

In this article, I've compiled 12of them for you.

1. Argument

Argument in computer programming are refers to the value passed into a function. For example, arguments are passed between two brackets "(argument1, argument2, argument3)."

2. Parentheses

In many programming languages, parentheses have a particular purpose. For instance, just like how we wrapped the argument above in (), parentheses are frequently used to enclose arguments to functions and methods.

Parentheses are also used for regular expressions and pattern grouping and capturing.

3. Assignment

Erases an object's current value and replaces that value with a new one.

4. Block

A block of code or code block is a linguistic structure of source code grouped. Blocks consist of one or more declarations and statements.

Think of a block of code being a paragraph with one or more sentences.

5. Built-in type

Keywords that came with a programming language to make life easier for you; these are functions and classes performing specific tasks that you don't necessarily need to care how they work. Instead, call them by their keyword whenever you need them.

6. Character string literal

Another term for string literal. "String literals" are group of characters from the source character set enclosed in double or single quotation marks (" ").

7. Class

Classes are facilities for defining our own data structures and associated operations (operations are also called methods). Classes are fundamental features in computer programming.

8. Methods

Synonym for a member function. A method is a function that exposes the behaviour of an object.

Think of the method as a verb (actions). Whatever you want your program to do, you can declare it in a function and call it by its name whenever you need it.

9 Comments

Written program text that is ignored by the compiler. Whatever you want a human to read and you want the machine to ignore, comment it out.

10. Condition

A conditional statement is a declaration that is executed as true or false. A zero value is false; any other value yields true.

11. Data structure

Data structures are logical groupings of data and the activities you want the data to perform. In computer science, a data structure comprises data management, organisation and storage format that enables efficient access and modification.

12. End-of-file

In computing, the end-of-file is a condition in a computer OS (operating system) with no more data left to read in the source file. The data source is usually called a file or stream. A system-specific marker indicates that there is no more input in a file.