Activity of Creating an Admissions Form

Lesson Details:

I: Introduction

The term “Programming language” is generally used to refer to languages that are used for creating the programs that control the behavior of a computer. The programming languages are classified largely based on their purpose, syntactic structure, and the type of their implementation. Programming languages are further classified into Procedural, Object-oriented, Functional, Dataflow, Logic, and others (Global Open, 2015). The following paragraphs provide an overview of the different types of programming languages.

Programming languages are grouped into several categories based on their application area. First, there are machine-level programming languages which include assembly language and machine code. These languages are just machine level instructions that the computer can understand. Secondly they are high-level programming languages that are similar to human languages. They are easy to read and write unlike low-level languages. High-level programming languages can be classified into 3 categories:

Imperative languages which instruct the computer to perform some tasks in a sequential manner. This category includes most of the common programming languages such as Java, C++ etc.

Formal logic programming languages which are usually used for solving mathematical problems that contain relations among objects. This category includes Prolog, Common Lisp, and Haskell.

Declarative programming languages also known as declarative programming. They specify what should be done without detailing how it should be done. For example, if-then statements are used in this category. This category includes SQL, Prolog, APL, Haskell etc.

A third set of programming languages are functional programming languages. These are also called pure functional programming languages because they do not allow side effects. Side effects occur when a function call influences the state of the system outside of the function. This category includes Lisp, Scheme, ML, Haskell etc.(Global Open, 2015).

Programming Languages have been classified into two major groups: Dynamic and Static typing. In dynamic typing, the type of data is determined at runtime while in static typing, the type is determined at compile time. Examples of dynamic typing are Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP etc. examples of static typing are Ada, Go, Rust etc. Programs written in dynamic typing are more flexible than those written in static typing because they can handle changes to data types at runtime.(Global Open, 2015).

Programs are made up of various components such as variables and functions .Variables store values like strings and numbers but functions perform operations like adding and multiplying numbers together and returning them as output. Functions help make programs easy to read and understand by breaking down large pieces of code into smaller ones. Programming without functions would be like using a hammer to tear down a wall rather than using a saw to cut it down into smaller pieces making it easier to manage.(Global Open, 2015).

II: Body

A: Activity of creating an admissions form

To create an admissions form you need to use a programming language such as JavaScript or HTML5 etc. It will require you to set up a database and you can store all your data about the students in it. The data could be the name and age of the student, their addresses and phone numbers etc. You can store your data in tables and use them as necessary through your program. Then you need to setup functions to manage your data such as adding new students and updating existing ones as well as displaying them on the screen as required.(Global Open, 2015).

B: Program design principles

The first principle is that program design should be clearly separated from the implementation details which means that you should not put any implementation details into your program design document or any other document because this will make it hard to change things later on without having to rewrite a lot of things. The second principle is to make it small enough to be easy to modify and maintain.(Global Open, 2015).

C: Sensitivity analysis

This component involves looking at all the inputs into your program and checking what effect they have on the program outputs to ensure that it works correctly for all possible input values. You can then find out how sensitive your program is to changes in its inputs by producing graphs that show the relationship between inputs and outputs for various input values(Global Open, 2015). The next step is to create a test plan so that you can manually or automatically test your program with a variety of input values chosen at random from a large set to ensure that it works correctly under all conditions(Global Open, 2015).

III: Conclusion