Operation - Definition and Overview

The word operation can mean any of several things:

• The method, act, process, or effect of using a device or system. See military operations, manufacturing operations, anomalous operation.
• The tactical shooting PC game Operation Flashpoint
• In medicine, a surgical procedure to diagnose, cure or palliate a certain disease.
• In mathematics, a well-defined action that, when applied to any permissible combination of known entities, produces a new entity, e.g. , the process of addition in arithmetic--in adding 5 and 3 to obtain 8, the numbers 5 and 3 are the operands, the number 8 is the result, and the plus sign is the operator indicating that the operation performed is addition. See operator, unary operation, binary operation. Examples of operations include addition, multiplication, extraction, comparison, bit-shift, and transfer.
• In computer programming, a program step, usually specified by a part of an instruction word, that is undertaken or executed by a computer. Logical operations such as And, Or and Not are also operations typically performed by devices known as Logic Gates.
• In music an basic operation is one which may be performed on a set of pitches or pitch classes, including transposition, inversion, and multiplication. These may be combined to form compound operations, and inversion may be more accurately thought of as the compound operation transpositional inversion. See: transformation, permutation, counterpoint.
• The board game Operation (board game)