Computer program

A computer program is something that tells a computer what to do. Computer programs can be installed onto a computer, they can be used to browse the Internet, to play computer games, to write documents or people can secretly use a computer virus, a trojan, adware or spyware to attack or spy on your computer! So, a computer program is just some data that tells your computer different things it can do or show. Firefox is an example of a computer program. Internet Explorer is also one. Both "Firefox" and "Internet Explorer" are computer programs that let you look at webpages. Flash is another example of a computer program. It allows you to make or play computer games or computer cartoons.

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A computer program is stored as a file on your hard drive. When you run the program, the file is read and the processor reads the data from the file as a list of commands, and does them.

A computer program is written by someone called a programmer. It is very difficult to write in computer language, which is ones and zeroes, so computer programmers write in a programming language. Once it is written, the progammer uses a compiler to turn it into a language the computer can understand.

Programs have instructions which tell the computer what to do with data. Computers can get data. This is called input -- so the computer could add the numbers together, and output the result.

See programming language if you want to know more about how programs work.

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