Lecture 02 Intro - Program Construction Essentials

We have seen how a C# program can be made to do useful things like add two numbers together and get the result right some of the time. In this session we are going to look at the essential C# constructions which are used to create a program which can process data. The programs that we are considering at the moment work as follows:

1. Start
2. Read in some data
3. Do something with it.
4. Display a result
5. Stop

This is essentially how all programs work (except that they may not stop; instead they return to step 2 after step 4).

In terms of C# this means that we have to know:

• how the program can be made to perform particular operations in sequence
• how the operations are expressed
• how the program can store information that it is going to work on
• how the program can make decisions based on the information it is given
• how the program can display output to the user

These things will be covered in the lecture today.