Computational Power

• If that’s all there is, where do computers get their power from?

  • Hardware speed
    • A 500 megahertz processor is doing a half a billion things a second!
  • Linguistic abstraction
    • Programs are organized into hierarchies of abstractions so that lengthy computations can be described succinctly

• abstraction

  • A named compound thing that can be manipulated as a unit
  • Examples:
    • A group of declarations that go together
    • A group of statements that go together

• The subject of this lecture is how to structure programs, but the fundamental computational steps remain the same.