First Steps in Programming

By now you’re probably eager to create programs that allow your computer to really interact with the outside world. You don’t just want programs that work as glorified typewriters, displaying fixed information that you included in the program code, and indeed there’s a whole world of programming that goes beyond that. Ideally, you want to be able to enter data from the keyboard and have the program squirrel it away somewhere. This would make the program much more versatile. Your program would be able to access and manipulate these data, and it would be able to work with different data values each time you execute it. This idea of entering different information each time you run a program is what makes programming useful. A place to store an item of data that can vary in a program is not altogether surprisingly called a variable, and this is what this chapter covers.