There are two basic ways that a program can be executed: continuously and event driven. The execution style is dictated by the programming language, and is almost always event driven.
In event driven code, nothing runs until there is a triggering event. This is often the user clicking a button, pressing a key, following a link on a web site, or it could be a machine generated event, such as data arrives on a port or a set amount of time has elapsed. In any case, once the triggering event happens, a portion of code is executed. In a calculator, for example, when the user presses the equals button, the corresponding portion of the program to add, subtract, multiply or divide is carried out.
Continuously executed programs run every line of code, from top to bottom, and then immediately begin executing at the top again. Every line of code has a distinct output that is updated on a more-or-less continuous basis, as long as the program and processor run sufficiently fast. The most basic type of this program is often referred to as “bit banging” and is often used in the programming of industrial equipment. It is called bit banging because these types of programs look at inputs from multiple single bit sources, often push buttons, position sensors or selector switches and based on the states of these inputs, turn on or off a single bit output. The code can often be broken down into several lines of if-then-else statements such as “if A or B are ON then turn ON C else turn OFF C.”
Interestingly, these two different styles of program execution, even though they are defined by the programming language, can be written in such a way that they behave as they other type of program. Consider the following lines of pseudo-code that are written in an event driven language:
Event (User Click)
While (1)
If A or B Then C Else D
If A and B Then E Else F
End While
End Event
The above program will execute continuously, even though the programming language is event driven. Strictly speaking, this code would “hang” the processor as it would be stuck in an infinite loop that only deals with inputs A and B. In reality, there is a supervisory program (an operating system in a computer, for example) that oversees everything that is going on and will pause the execution of this program and give processing time to other programs to keep everything running as expected.
Like the above example, a continuous execution program can be written to appear to execute as though it were event driven. Here is another pseudo-code example written in a continuous language.
If A then B
If B then C
If C then D
Even though all of these lines of code are executed over and over, the only way to get to D is to first trigger A, which triggers B and so on, in an event driven fashion.
One other interesting note, excluding the newer multi-core processor systems, any given processor can only execute one command at a time, and can only execute commands sequentially. The speed of a processor allows it to appear to handle multiple tasks at one.