High five! We just got your first program to run.

C++, like most programming languages, runs line by line, from top to bottom. Here is the structure of a C++ program:

In between the curly braces is what we are going to focus on for now.

std::cout << "Hello World!\n";

• std::cout is the “character output stream”. It is pronounced “see-out”.
• << is an operator that comes right after it.
• "Hello World!\n" is what’s being outputted here. You need double quotes around text. The \n is a special character that indicates a new line.
• ; is a punctuation that tells the computer that you are at the end of a statement. It is similar to a period in a sentence.