C++ Vocabulary

Comment – text written in the source code that compiler ignores and is mainly meant for humans to read for showing how the program works

Conditional – decides which set of actions that the program will perform depending on a programmer specified condition

Constant – a special kind of variable whose value cannot change during program execution

Control structure – refers to the order in which the individual statements, instructions, or function calls of an imperative or a declarative program are executed or evaluated

Data structure – ways that data can be organized within a program

Data type – different varieties that data can be represented within a program

Directive – used to describe how the parts of a program are to be used to built a complete program

Identifier – programmer-specified name; a sequence of characters associated with and used to access a variable, particular object, class or struct, or function. Every identifier has a scope

Iteration – a single execution of a set of instructions that are to be repeated; “the solution took hundreds of iterations”

Keyword – a word that has particular meaning to the programming language and describes how a program is to work

Literal – a notation for representing a fixed value in source code. For example, the literal 12 represents the integer value “twelve”, “Morning” represents the character string value “Morning” and true represents the Boolean value true. They describe the type of value data has

Naming structure – rules for how data values, variables, operators, and other language constructs are referred to within the language

Operator – special symbols that specify how data is to be manipulated. For example, a ++ is an operator

Pragma – data embedded in source code by programmers to indicate some intention to the compiler

Sequential execution – execution by a computer if instructions in a program, performed in the sequence established by a programmer

Subprogram – a part of the code that is reused in various parts of the program

Variable – remembers data values for use within a program

Variable declaration – defining a variable’s type and name (identifier)