Name: Lec 2 | MIT 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, Fall 2008
Uploaded: 2014-04-02T05:12:56.000Z
Duration: 50 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The following content is provided under a Creative

Future simple

Your support will help MIT OpenCourseware continue to

offer high-quality educational resources for free.

To make a donation, or view additional materials from

hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseware,

A word of warning: fasten your seat belts.

Or, another way of saying it is, I'm going to open up the

Last lecture, you might have thought this was a SHASS class,

it's not like a philosophy class, and it was important to

set the stage for what we're going to talk about, but

The notion of recipes, the notion of computation, why

you want to do this, what you're going to learn.

Today we're going to dive into the nitty-gritty, the nuts and

bolts of the basics of computation, and in particular,

what I'm going to do today is, I'm going to talk about

operators and operands, which we did a little bit real last

time, in particular how to create expressions, I'm going

to talk about statements as the key building blocks for writing

code, and I'm going to introduce simple sets of

programs, in particular I'm going to talk about branching,

At the end of last lecture, we started introducing some of

We want to have things that deduce new kinds

If we're going to write programs, we need at least

two things: we need some representation for

And we saw last time two examples of that.

And the second thing we're going to need, is we're going

to need a way to give instructions to the computer

We need to give it a description of the recipe.

In terms of primitive data, what we saw were

A little later on in the lecture we're going to

introduce a third kind of value, but what we're going to

see throughout the term is, no matter how complex a data

structure we create, and we're going to create a variety of

data structures, fundamentally all of them have their basis,

their atomic level if you like, are going to be some

combinations of numbers, of strings, and the third type,

which are booleans, which I'm going to introduce a little

Numbers are there to do numeric things, strings are our

fundamental way of representing textual information.

And so we're going to see how to combine those

Second thing we saw was, we saw that associated with every

For numbers, we had some variations; we had

We'll introduce a few more as we go along.

But those types are important, because they tell us something

about what we want to do when we want to put them together.

OK, but nonetheless, I want to stress we have both a

Once we have them, we want to start making combinations

And for that, we combine things in expressions.

And what we saw as expressions are formed of operands

And the simple things we did were the sort of things you'd

Now I want to stress one other nuance here.

Which is, and we're going to do some examples of this,

initially we just typed in expressions into the

interpreter; that is, directly into Python.

And as I suggested last time, the interpreter is actually a

program inside of the machine that is basically following the

rules we're describing here to deduce the value

And if we type directly into the interpreter, it essentially

Most of the time, we're going to be doing expressions inside

of some piece of code, inside of a script, which is the

In there, I want to make this distinction, this nuance: the

evaluator is still going to be taking those expressions and

using its rules to get a value, but it's not going to

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Lec 2 | MIT 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, Fall 2008

expression

piece

statement

fact