In computer science, source code (commonly just source) is any collection of statements or declarations written in some human-readable computer programming language. Source code allows the programmer to communicate with the computer using a reserved number of instructions.
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In computer science, source code (commonly just source) is any collection of statements or declarations written in some human-readable computer programming language. Source code allows the programmer to communicate with the computer using a reserved number of instructions.
The source code which constitutes a program is usually held in one or more text files, sometimes stored in databases as stored procedures and may also appear as code snippets printed in books or other media. A large collection of source code files may be organized into a directory tree, in which case it may also be known as a source tree.
A computer program's source code is the collection of files needed to convert from human-readable form to some kind of computer-executable form. The source code may be converted into an executable file by a compiler, or executed on the fly from the human readable form with the aid of an interpreter.
The code base of a programming project is the larger collection of all the source code of all the computer programs which make up the project.
Purposes
Source code is primarily used as input to the process that produces an executable program (ie., it is compiled or interpreted). It is also used as a method of communicating algorithms between people (eg., code snippets in books).Spinellis, D: Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective. Addison-Wesley Professional, 2003. ISBN 0-201-79940-5
Programmers often find it helpful to review existing source code to learn about programming techniques. The sharing of source code between developers is frequently cited as a contributing factor to the maturation of their programming skills. Some people consider source code an expressive artistic medium.
Porting software to other computer platforms is usually prohibitively difficult without source code. Without the source code for a particular piece of software portability is generally computationally expensive Fact: date=October 2008. Possible porting options include binary translation and emulation of the original platform.
Decompilation of an executable program can be used to generate source code, either in assembly code or in a high level language.
Programmers frequently adapt source code from one piece of software to use in other projects, a concept known as software reusability.
Organization
The source code for a particular piece of software may be contained in a single file or many files. Though uncommon, a program's source code is not necessarily all written in the same programming language. For example, a program written primarily in the C programming language, might have portions written in Assembly language for optimization purposes. It is also possible for some components of a piece of software to be written and compiled separately, in an arbitrary programming language, and later integrated into the software using a technique called library linking. This is the case in some languages, such as Java: each class is compiled separately into a file and linked by the interpreter at runtime.
