Introduction

If you want a computer to do something, a program is required. RAPID is a programming language for writing such a program. The native language of computers consists of only zeros and ones.

This is virtually impossible for humans to understand. Therefore computers are taught to understand a language that is relatively easy to understand - a high level programming language. RAPID is a high level programming language, it uses some English words (like IF and FOR) to make it understandable for humans.

Example

Let us look at a simple example to see what a RAPID program can look like with a program that calculates the area of a rectangle and writes it on the FlexPendant:

MODULE MainModule
    VAR num length;
    VAR num width;
    VAR num area;
    PROC main()
        length := 10;
        width := 5;
        area := length * width;
        TPWrite "The area of the rectangle is " \Num:=area;
    END PROC
ENDMODULE

The output is:

The area of the rectangle is 50.