Faculty of Science

Objectives

To provide a historical and contemporary background to computers and the use of a programming language.

Contents

Introduction: history of computers;. types of today's computers; some application areas of computers; Computers & Society; impact on jobs and lifestyles; advantages/disadvantages; computers in developing countries; capabilities and limits of computing/computerisation. Computer organisation: configuration of a computer, central processor unit; main memory; peripheral devices; operation of components; mention of stages/cycles in processing machine instructions; Information; need for coding; binary coding of numeric and non-numeric data; mention coding of instructions, mention of ASCII/EBCDIC character sets; software concepts; Operating System; files; programming languages, compilers/interpreters; assemblers; application packages; Simple notions on files and storing of information on computes; on word-processing; Introduction to an imperative programming language and to programme development; Simple data structures; integers, real numbers, characters; arrays; constants and variables; The notion of types; simple types; composite types; uses of composite data structures such as arrays; mention of records and file-structures; algorithms introducing programming constructions, as well as solving simple problems; Implementing algorithms in the programming language