Programming Basics: Article Rating: Above Average (#

of votes: 3)
Part Two
Author: Icydemon
Submitted: 13-Feb-2008 16:22:17

Variables, arithmetic, logical operations and operators.

The Variable

In programming terms we can refer to a variable as "a fixed amount of

space in memory (meaning RAM) where we can store a value needed by a
program for its execution". But what the heck is that, exactly?

To explain this, let's assume we have a problem wherein we need to

calculate the sum of the numbers from 1 to 10. To do this, we need a
variable to store the sum of the numbers we add each time. So it looks like
this:
Sum = 0
Sum = Sum + 1
Sum = Sum + 2
....
Sum = Sum + 10
In our piece of code above, "Sum" is a variable. When we are using a
programming language (e.g. C) we have to declare and often also
initialize our variable. Each programming language has its own structure
and method for declaring variables. In C, for example, you create an integer
variable named Sum simply by doing this:
int Sum;
Remember also that a variable is only a reference to a position in memory.
This means that when we declare the variable Sum in our example, the
computer will reserve enough space to hold the contents of the variable,
and when we refer to that particular variable, the computer will do the
operations with the contents of that particular space in memory.

Types of Variables
There are three major variable types: numeric variables (which are used to
store numbers), alphanumeric variables (which are used to store
characters, numbers and symbols in a string format), and logical variables
(which store logical values, like true or false.

Each programming language has many variations of each of the above

types. For example, in C you can declare an integer variable using the int
keyword (which can be short or long), you can declare a single precision
numeric variable using float, etc. These are all numeric variables, but each
one has its own size and is handled differently. For example, the long long
double type is 80 bits in length while double is only 32 bits).

Declaring a Variable
As was said earlier, how a variable is declared depends on the language that
you use. In our examples from now on we will use the C style, since most
languages inherit C's structure and syntax. To declare in C we do the
following:
int myVariable;
This declares an integer variable named myVariable. C variables are case-
sensitive; myVariable, myvariable and mYvArIaBlE are not the same
variable. However, C standards for readability dictate that we capitalize the
first letter of each word.