Sometimes we want to tell computers what to do. People like using words to tell people or things what to do. But computers don't understand words in this way. Instead, they understand numbers that tell them what to do. So we need to tell computers what the words mean as numbers. This is an easy story that tells how we can do that (but doesn't tell in fine points).
To tell computers what words mean as numbers, we can write words that change other words into numbers. To do this, we need to decide what words we can use and what orders we can use them in. Then we need to tell the computer what to do with these words.
Even though a computer can't read words that tell it what to do, it can see if one word is the same as another word. It can do this for one word after another after another. We can tell the computer what words are allowed to follow earlier words. And we can give these groups of words names. Some groups of words can have other named groups of words inside them. Some words by themselves have names wi