Hello, world
computer program that produces the message "Hello, world!", often used to illustrate the basic syntax of a programming language
A "Hello, world" program is usually a simple computer program that outputs a message similar to "Hello, world". The text may be printed out or displayed on a screen (often a console). A small piece of code in most general-purpose programming languages, this program is used to illustrate a language's basic syntax. Such a program is often the first written by a student of a new programming language, but it can also be used as a sanity check to ensure that the computer software intended to compile or run source code is correctly installed, and that its operator understands how to use it.
History
While several small test programs have existed since the development of programmable computers, the tradition of using the phrase "Hello, world" as a test message was influenced by an example program in the 1978 book The C Programming Language, with likely earlier use in BCPL. The example program from the book prints "hello, world", and was inherited from a 1974 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum by Brian Kernighan, Programming in C: A Tutorial:
In the above example, the main( ) function defines where the program should start executing. The function body consists of a single statement, a call to the printf() function, which stands for "print formatted"; it outputs to the console whatever is passed to it as the parameter, in this case the string "hello, world".
The C-language version was preceded by Kernighan's own 1972 A Tutorial Introduction to the Language B, where the first known version of the program is found in an example used to illustrate external variables:
The program above prints hello, world! on the terminal, including a newline character. The phrase is divided into multiple variables because in B, a character constant is limited to four ASCII characters. The previous example in the tutorial printed hi!
“Hello, world” enters the record as computer program that produces the message "Hello, world!", often used to illustrate the basic syntax of a programming language. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hello, world and computer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q131303. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1978, 1974 and 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hello, world” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.