10)

A computer is a general purpose machine which can be made to act like a special purpose machine by means of a program.
To me,  this means that a computer might be a sophisticated machine with all its circuit boards and processors and whatever,  but it's still useless without someone's brain giving it instructions to follow.

Computer program.    Without the code to make the computer do fancy stuff,  the omputer isn't all that useful.

Variables.    I think they are important because you can assign an input from the standard input stream to a variable and thus not to have to write the same code over and over to accomodate each specific input.

Classification.    The process of grouping objects with the same properties into sets allows the user easy access to them.

Mechanisms of Iteration.    Obviously,  these little beauties make programming much simpler.

Arrays.    Arrays utilize the power of today's computers very effectively by allowing large lists of similar items to be sorted and searched quickly.

Incremental Programming.    By ' versioning' your program,  you can know quickly if additional code to your program is behaving as expected.

Problem Decomposition.    By breaking your problem into a set of more easily attainable subproblems,  one can proceed with solving the problem in a more organized and efficient manner.

Imaginative Construction.    By looking at the problem from ' outside the lines',  one may see a shortcut to the solution that wasn't immediately obvious in the problem description.

The idea of reuseability of code.    Having classes such as blue.io.   *    and blue.math.   *    available to import into any program we wish is a very powerful concept.    It avoids having to ' reinvent the wheel' each time you need to carry the functionality of a certain program into a new program.