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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.
The instruction cycle (also known as the fetch–decode–execute cycle, or simply the fetch–execute cycle) is the cycle that the central processing unit (CPU) follows from boot-up until the computer has shut down in order to process instructions. It is composed of three main stages: the fetch stage, the decode stage, and the execute stage.
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 ...
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 computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly executes instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without requiring them previously to have been compiled into a machine language program. An interpreter generally uses one of the following strategies for program execution:
In computer systems a loader is the part of an operating system that is responsible for loading programs and libraries. It is one of the essential stages in the process of starting a program, as it places programs into memory and prepares them for execution.
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. [3]