On the other hand, it is useful to know what the steps are that are happening in the background, so that if something goes wrong you can figure out what it is. A program is a sequence of instructions that specifies how to perform a computation. Believe it or not, that's pretty much all there is to it. Every program you've ever used, no matter how complicated, is made up of functions that look more or less like these. Thus, one way to describe programming is the process of breaking a large, complex task up into smaller and smaller subtasks until eventually the subtasks are simple enough to be performed with one of these simple functions.
Programming is a complex process, and since it is done by human beings, it often leads to errors.
For whimsical reasons, programming errors are called bugs and the process of tracking them down and correcting them is called debugging . There are a few different kinds of errors that can occur in a program, and it is useful to distinguish between them in order to track them down more quickly. Syntax refers to the structure of your program and the rules about that structure. For example, in English, a sentence must begin with a capital letter and end with a period. For most readers, a few syntax errors are not a significant problem, which is why we can read the poetry of e e cummings without spewing error messages.