Fundamentals on vhmp.dev

Values

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This page was created with the assistance of GPT-5.6 Sol.

Values

This is the first programming concept that student learns. The prerequisites are omitted. Any difficulty in understanding would come from a lack of vocabulary due to age or the lack of engagement of innate intuition.

Why Values Are the First Thing You Understand

There is no way to directly represent what a value is in any programming language. One might say that in programming language X, I can make a variable that is assigned a value. While that is functionally accurate, a value is more so an idea of the kind of information a computer can store, pass around, choose, change, remove, etc.

Data Types

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This page was created with the assistance of GPT-5.6 Sol.

Data Types

After learning values are, it’s likely that you have already chosen a programming language.

Most general-purpose programming languages share a small set of common basic data types.

General-Purpose

If you choose a programming language that’s attractive to beginners, they are most definitely general-purpose. Domain-specific language (DSL) is another type of programming language. These languages cannot build any type of software (yes, even JavaScript, a general-purpose language can build an operating system that’s extremely inefficient).

Variables

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Variables

Think of variables as a tracker of values. Typically, we say that we create a variable and we assign a value to that variable. We also often can say that we intialize a variable with a value if we want to be specific and say that memory is allocated to a variable and it will automatically keep track of a specific value.

To use a variable, you have to make sure it is declared (and most likely defined in the same process).

Namespaces

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Namespaces

Warning

This is a more complex topic that can be skipped over for the first time you learn a programming language. It becomes important if you’re learning the historical trend of how unmanaged languages are designed which includes especially C, C++, Rust…

Namespaces prevent naming conflict and they categorize different and names (synonymously labels, or identifiers).

We generalize variables to introduce the term identifiers. A variable is a type of identifier. An identifier syntactic form of a name of a code element like function, variables, classes… In C++ variables without a specified namespace is inside the global namespace. Standard C does use the term “namespace” but it is a different meaning than C++; namespace in C is just a categorization of identifier while C++ namespaces can group any identifiers together in a way that a programmer define instead of as mechanic of the compiler.

Scope

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Different from namespaces, scope rules the declarations the computer can look up at a particular point in the translation unit. Scope does not have anything to do with access control which can deny the usage of a declaration if it’s for example private or protected in programming languages that you can set access control.

Declarations

A declaration introduces names (which include identifiers or non-identifiers) into a namespace (an existing classification or arbitrary grouping defined by a programmer).