Some are fine for small lists, while others are very efficient when the list is completely disordered but slow when a list is nearly completely ordered. It is up to you, the programmer, to chose the correct method for your needs. If you pick the wrong method, your program could be inefficient, especially if your program grows beyond your original vision. When coming up with an algorithm, a computer scientist doesn't have to know anything specific about the particular language you'll be programmin. For example, nearly all programming languages let you work with variables .
Variables are simply storage containers for information.
Another common programming technique is the ability to do loops. A loop is simply a program's way of repeating an action a number of times. There are different kinds of loops, such as loops that repeat a specific number of times to loops that repeat until something happens. Loops and variables would be very important to solving our sorting problem above. We'd use a loop to tell the computer to keep sorting until the list was done.