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Technical edge key to the future

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Why you can trust SCMP
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There are many reasons for Java's success, but there are two technical ones that are worth looking at that may not be obvious to those who do not write programs. One is object-oriented programming (OOP), and the other memory management.

Most of us already know that computers are really nothing but enormous and complex switches. All a computer really understands is on and off. When an image on a computer screen is manipulated in such a way as to create an extraordinary effect, the computer - at the lowest level - is still dealing with the binary values of 0 and 1.

Despite all of the progress made in programming, a computer's central processing unit (CPU) still understands only numbers, and then it really understands only 0 and 1. We use this to trick it into behaving as if it understands much more.

When we program a computer we can assign symbols or English words to represent the values that the CPU can understand. In this way, we can read the program easily (it will make sense, of course, only to those who can understand the symbols).

At some stage, however, the symbols must be translated into the numbers that the computer understands, a process normally called compiling.

When we speak of writing an application in C or Pascal, for example, we normally mean writing instructions according to the language rules of C or Pascal, and then compiling it for the CPU we are working on.

With languages like C or Pascal, the emphasis was on the design of algorithms, or the code that handled the data. Only afterwards did you build the data structures.

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