Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Terminology

Terminology

The term "software" is sometimes used in a broader context to describe any electronic media content which embodies expressions of ideas such as film, tapes, records, etc.[1]

A screenshot of computer software - AbiWord.
A screenshot of computer software - AbiWord.

The term "software" as an instruction-procedural programming source for scheduling instruction streams according to the von Neumann machine paradigm should not be confused with Configware and Flowware, which are programming sources for configuring the resources (structural "programming" by Configware) and for scheduling the data streams (data-procedural programming by Flowware) of the Anti machine paradigm of Reconfigurable Computing systems. This is an important issue, since Computer Science is meanwhile a dual-paradigm world, due to the existence of FPGAs and Reconfigurable Computing.

[edit] Relationship to computer hardware

Main article: Computer hardware

Computer software is so called in contrast to computer hardware, which encompasses the physical interconnections and devices required to store and execute (or run) the software. In computers, software is loaded into RAM and executed in the central processing unit. At the lowest level, software consists of a machine language specific to an individual processor. A machine language consists of groups of binary values signifying processor instructions (object code), which change the state of the computer from its preceding state. Software is an ordered sequence of instructions for changing the state of the computer hardware in a particular sequence. It is usually written in high-level programming languages that are easier and more efficient for humans to use (closer to natural language) than machine language. High-level languages are compiled or interpreted into machine language object code. Software may also be written in an assembly language, essentially, a mnemonic representation of a machine language using a natural language alphabet. Assembly language must be assembled into object code via an assembler.

The term "software" was first used in this sense by John W. Tukey in 1958.[2] In computer science and software engineering, computer software is all computer programs. The concept of reading different sequences of instructions into the memory of a device to control computations was invented by Charles Babbage as part of his difference engine. The theory that is the basis for most modern software was first proposed by Alan Turing in his 1935 essay Computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.[3]

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