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Execution in computer and software engineering is the process by which a computer or virtual machine interprets and acts on the instructions of a computer program.Each instruction of a program is a description of a particular action which must be carried out, in order for a specific problem to be solved.
A computer program is a sequence or set [a] of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. It is one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. [1] A computer program in its human-readable form is called source code.
In computer science, executable code, an executable file, or an executable program, sometimes simply referred to as an executable or binary, causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instructions", [2] as opposed to a data file that must be interpreted by an interpreter to be functional.
Software consists of computer programs that instruct the execution of a computer. [1] Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital computers in the mid-20th century.
Depending on the OS, a process may be made up of multiple threads of execution that execute instructions concurrently. [1] [2] While a computer program is a passive collection of instructions typically stored in a file on disk, a process is the execution of those instructions after being loaded from the disk into memory. Several processes may ...
Computer programming or coding is the composition of sequences of instructions, called programs, that computers can follow to perform tasks. [1] [2] It involves designing and implementing algorithms, step-by-step specifications of procedures, by writing code in one or more programming languages.
In computer programming, machine code is computer code consisting of machine language instructions, which are used to control a computer's central processing unit (CPU). For conventional binary computers, machine code is the binary representation of a computer program which is actually read and interpreted by the computer. A program in machine ...
In general, a callable unit is a list of instructions that, starting at the first instruction, executes sequentially except as directed via its internal logic. It can be invoked (called) many times during the execution of a program. Execution continues at the next instruction after the call instruction when it returns control.