Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++, 2nd Edition

2. Hello, World!

“Programming is learned by writing programs.”

—Brian Kernighan

Here, we present the simplest C++ program that actually does anything. The purpose of writing this program is to

• Let you try your programming environment

• Give you a first feel of how you can get a computer to do things for you

Thus, we present the notion of a program, the idea of translating a program from human-readable form to machine instructions using a compiler, and finally executing those machine instructions.

2.1 Programs

2.2 The classic first program

2.3 Compilation

2.4 Linking

2.5 Programming environments

2.1 Programs

To get a computer to do something, you (or someone else) have to tell it exactly — in excruciating detail — what to do. Such a description ...