Program state - Citizendia

One of the key concepts in computer programming is the idea of state, essentially a snapshot of the measure of various conditions in the system. Most programming languages require a considerable amount of state information in order to operate properly - information which is generally hidden from the programmer. A programming language is an Artificial language that can be used to write programs which control the behavior of a machine particularly a Computer. For a real-world example, consider a three-way light switch. A light switch is a Switch, most commonly used to operate Electric lights permanently connected equipment or Electrical outlets In modern homes An ordinary switch turns on a light when it's in the "up" position, but in a three-way switch the "up" position could be on or off, depending on the state or "configuration" of the other switch, which is likely out of view.

In fact, the state is often hidden from the computer's hardware as well, which normally has no idea that this piece of information determines program state, while that piece is a temporary variable and will soon be discarded. This is a serious problem, as the state information needs to be shared across multiple processors in parallel processing machines. Without knowing which state is important and which isn't, most languages force the programmer to add a considerable amount of extra code to indicate which data and parts of the code are important in this respect.

In computer science, imperative programming is opposed to declarative programming. Computer science (or computing science) is the study and the Science of the theoretical foundations of Information and Computation and their In Computer science, Declarative programming is a Programming paradigm that attempts to minimize or eliminate side effects by describing what Imperative programming is a programming paradigm that describes computation in terms of a program state and statements that change the program state. A programming paradigm is a fundamental style of Computer programming. In Computer science and Automata theory, a state is a unique configuration of information in a program or machine

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