People state information and instructions in English. Computers, however, barely understand basic English and certainly can't understand complex instructions expressed in English. Instead we must learn to speak a computer language so that we can communicate information and instructions. Information expressed in a programming language is called DATA . There are many flavors of data.
Numbers are one class of data.
Data represents information, but the concrete interpretation is up to us. For example, a number like 37.51 may represent a temperature, a time, or a distance. Thus, we may think of primitive operations as the words of a foreign language and of programming as forming sentences in this language. Some programs are as small as essays. Others are like sets of encyclopedias.