Code

What Does Code Mean?

Code, in a general sense, is the language understood by the computer. Computers don’t understand natural language. As such the human language has to be converted into a set of “words” that are understood by the computer. The words that initiate a standard action when used in a program are called keywords. The arrangement of keywords for successful execution of a desired computation is called syntax. The set of keywords and syntax form a programming language.

Techopedia Explains Code

The term code by itself is so general that it doesn’t convey much information. It can be useful to think of code in terms of instructions versus data. That is, computer code uses data as an input, does some processing, then spits out the output.

In addition to referring to the code itself, you can use the term as a verb – to code is synonymous with coding or programming.

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Margaret Rouse

Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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