Language Structures & Components

Programming languages use specific types of statements, or instructions, to provide functional structure to the program. A statement in a program is a basic sentence that expresses a simple idea—its purpose is to give the computer a basic instruction. Statements define the types of data allowed, how data are to be manipulated, and the ways that procedures and functions work. Programmers use statements to manipulate common components of programming languages, such as variables and macros (mini-programs within a program).

Statements known as data declarations give names and properties to elements of a program called variables. Variables can be assigned different values within the program. The properties variables can have are called types, and they include such things as what possible values might be saved in the variables, how much numerical accuracy is to be used in the values, and how one variable may represent a collection of simpler values in an organized fashion, such as a table or array. In many programming languages, a key data type is a pointer. Variables that are pointers do not themselves have values; instead, they have information that the computer can use to locate some other variable—that is, they point to another variable.

An expression is a piece of a statement that describes a series of computations to be performed on some of the program’s variables, such as X + Y/Z, in which the variables are X, Y, and Z and the computations are addition and division. An assignment statement assigns a variable a value derived from some expression, while conditional statements specify expressions to be tested and then used to select which other statements should be executed next.

Procedure and function statements define certain blocks of code as procedures or functions that can then be returned to later in the program. These statements also define the kinds of variables and parameters the programmer can choose and the type of value that the code will return when an expression accesses the procedure or function. Many programming languages also permit minitranslation programs called macros. Macros translate segments of code that have been written in a language structure defined by the programmer into statements that the programming language understands.

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