Programming language

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A programming language is an artificial language designed to express computations that can be performed by a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine, to express algorithms precisely, or as a mode of human communication.

Many programming languages have some form of written specification of their syntax (form) and semantics (meaning). Some languages are defined by a specification document. For example, the C programming language is specified by an ISO Standard. Other languages, such as Perl, have a dominant implementation that is used as a reference.

The earliest programming languages predate the invention of the computer, and were used to direct the behavior of machines such as Jacquard looms and player pianos. Thousands of different programming languages have been created, mainly in the computer field, with many more being created every year. Most programming languages describe computation in an imperative style, i.e., as a sequence of commands, although some languages, such as those that support functional programming or logic programming, use alternative forms of description.

[edit] Definitions

A programming language is a notation for writing programs, which are specifications of a computation or algorithm.^[1] Some, but not all, authors restrict the term "programming language" to those languages that can express all possible algorithms.^[1][2] Traits often considered important for what constitutes a programming language include:

• Function and target: A computer programming language is a language^[3] used to write computer programs, which involve a computer performing some kind of computation^[4] or algorithm and possibly control external devices such as printers, disk drives, robots,^[5] and so on. For example PostScript programs are frequently created by another program to control a computer printer or display. More generally, a programming language may describe computation on some, possibly abstract, machine. It is generally accepted that a complete specification for a programming language includes a description, possibly idealized, of a machine or processor for that language.^[6] In most practical contexts, a programming language involves a computer; consequently programming languages are usually defined and studied this way.^[7] Programming languages differ from natural languages in that natural languages are only used for interaction between people, while programming languages also allow humans to communicate instructions to machines.

• Abstractions: Programming languages usually contain abstractions for defining and manipulating data structures or controlling the flow of execution. The practical necessity that a programming language support adequate abstractions is expressed by the abstraction principle;^[8] this principle is sometimes formulated as recommendation to the programmer to make proper use of such abstractions.^[9]

• Expressive power: The theory of computation classifies languages by the computations they are capable of expressing. All Turing complete languages can implement the same set of algorithms. ANSI/ISO SQL and Charity are examples of languages that are not Turing complete, yet often called programming languages.^[10][11]

Markup languages like XML, HTML or troff, which define structured data, are not generally considered programming languages.^[12][13][14] Programming languages may, however, share the syntax with markup languages if a computational semantics is defined. XSLT, for example, is a Turing complete XML dialect.^[15][16][17] Moreover, LaTeX, which is mostly used for structuring documents, also contains a Turing complete subset.^[18][19]

The term computer language is sometimes used interchangeably with programming language.^[20] However, the usage of both terms varies among authors, including the exact scope of each. One usage describes programming languages as a subset of computer languages.^[21] In this vein, languages used in computing that have a different goal than expressing computer programs are generically designated computer languages. For instance, markup languages are sometimes referred to as computer languages to emphasize that they are not meant to be used for programming.^[22] Another usage regards programming languages as theoretical constructs for programming abstract machines, and computer languages as the subset thereof that runs on physical computers, which have finite hardware resources.^[23] John C. Reynolds emphasizes that formal specification languages are just as much programming languages as are the languages intended for execution. He also argues that textual and even graphical input formats that affect the behavior of a computer are programming languages, despite the fact they are commonly not Turing-complete, and remarks that ignorance of programming language concepts is the reason for many flaws in input formats.^[24]

[edit] Design and implementation

Programming languages share properties with natural languages related to their purpose as vehicles for communication, having a syntactic form separate from its semantics, and showing language families of related languages branching one from another.^[3] But as artificial constructs, they also differ in fundamental ways from languages that have evolved through usage. A significant difference is that a programming language can be fully described and studied in its entirety, since it has a precise and finite definition.^[25] By contrast, natural languages have changing meanings given by their users in different communities. While constructed languages are also artificial languages designed from the ground up with a specific purpose, they lack the precise and complete semantic definition that a programming language has.

Many languages have been designed from scratch, altered to meet new needs, combined with other languages, and eventually fallen into disuse. Although there have been attempts to design one "universal" programming language that serves all purposes, all of them have failed to be generally accepted as filling this role.^[26] The need for diverse programming languages arises from the diversity of contexts in which languages are used:

• Programs range from tiny scripts written by individual hobbyists to huge systems written by hundreds of programmers.
• Programmers range in expertise from novices who need simplicity above all else, to experts who may be comfortable with considerable complexity.
• Programs must balance speed, size, and simplicity on systems ranging from microcontrollers to supercomputers.
• Programs may be written once and not change for generations, or they may undergo continual modification.
• Finally, programmers may simply differ in their tastes: they may be accustomed to discussing problems and expressing them in a particular language.

One common trend in the development of programming languages has been to add more ability to solve problems using a higher level of abstraction. The earliest programming languages were tied very closely to the underlying hardware of the computer. As new programming languages have developed, features have been added that let programmers express ideas that are more remote from simple translation into underlying hardware instructions. Because programmers are less tied to the complexity of the computer, their programs can do more computing with less effort from the programmer. This lets them write more functionality per time unit.^[27]

Natural language processors have been proposed as a way to eliminate the need for a specialized language for programming. However, this goal remains distant and its benefits are open to debate. Edsger W. Dijkstra took the position that the use of a formal language is essential to prevent the introduction of meaningless constructs, and dismissed natural language programming as "foolish".^[28] Alan Perlis was similarly dismissive of the idea.^[29]

A language's designers and users must construct a number of artifacts that govern and enable the practice of programming. The most important of these artifacts are the language specification and implementation.

[edit] Specification

The specification of a programming language is intended to provide a definition that the language users and the implementors can use to determine whether the behavior of a program is correct, given its source code.

A programming language specification can take several forms, including the following:

• An explicit definition of the syntax, static semantics, and execution semantics of the language. While syntax is commonly specified using a formal grammar, semantic definitions may be written in natural language (e.g., as in the C language), or a formal semantics (e.g., as in Standard ML^[30] and Scheme^[31] specifications).
• A description of the behavior of a translator for the language (e.g., the C++ and Fortran specifications). The syntax and semantics of the language have to be inferred from this description, which may be written in natural or a formal language.
• A reference or model implementation, sometimes written in the language being specified (e.g., Prolog or ANSI REXX^[32]). The syntax and semantics of the language are explicit in the behavior of the reference implementation.

[edit] Implementation

An implementation of a programming language provides a way to execute that program on one or more configurations of hardware and software. There are, broadly, two approaches to programming language implementation: compilation and interpretation. It is generally possible to implement a language using either technique.

The output of a compiler may be executed by hardware or a program called an interpreter. In some implementations that make use of the interpreter approach there is no distinct boundary between compiling and interpreting. For instance, some implementations of BASIC compile and then execute the source a line at a time.

Programs that are executed directly on the hardware usually run several orders of magnitude faster than those that are interpreted in software.^{[citation needed]}

One technique for improving the performance of interpreted programs is just-in-time compilation. Here the virtual machine, just before execution, translates the blocks of bytecode which are going to be used to machine code, for direct execution on the hardware.

[edit] Usage

Thousands of different programming languages have been created, mainly in the computing field.^[33] Programming languages differ from most other forms of human expression in that they require a greater degree of precision and completeness. When using a natural language to communicate with other people, human authors and speakers can be ambiguous and make small errors, and still expect their intent to be understood. However, figuratively speaking, computers "do exactly what they are told to do", and cannot "understand" what code the programmer intended to write. The combination of the language definition, a program, and the program's inputs must fully specify the external behavior that occurs when the program is executed, within the domain of control of that program.

A programming language provides a structured mechanism for defining pieces of data, and the operations or transformations that may be carried out automatically on that data. A programmer uses the abstractions present in the language to represent the concepts involved in a computation. These concepts are represented as a collection of the simplest elements available (called primitives).^[34] Programming is the process by which programmers combine these primitives to compose new programs, or adapt existing ones to new uses or a changing environment.

Programs for a computer might be executed in a batch process without human interaction, or a user might type commands in an interactive session of an interpreter. In this case the "commands" are simply programs, whose execution is chained together. When a language is used to give commands to a software application (such as a shell) it is called a scripting language.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Measuring language usage

It is difficult to determine which programming languages are most widely used, and what usage means varies by context. One language may occupy the greater number of programmer hours, a different one have more lines of code, and a third utilize the most CPU time. Some languages are very popular for particular kinds of applications. For example, COBOL is still strong in the corporate data center, often on large mainframes; FORTRAN in engineering applications; C in embedded applications and operating systems; and other languages are regularly used to write many different kinds of applications.

Various methods of measuring language popularity, each subject to a different bias over what is measured, have been proposed:

• counting the number of job advertisements that mention the language^[35]
• the number of books sold that teach or describe the language^[36]
• estimates of the number of existing lines of code written in the language—which may underestimate languages not often found in public searches^[37]
• counts of language references (i.e., to the name of the language) found using a web search engine.

Combining and averaging information from various internet sites, langpop.com claims that ^[38] in 2008 the 10 most cited programming languages are (in alphabetical order): C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and SQL.

[edit] Taxonomies

There is no overarching classification scheme for programming languages. A given programming language does not usually have a single ancestor language. Languages commonly arise by combining the elements of several predecessor languages with new ideas in circulation at the time. Ideas that originate in one language will diffuse throughout a family of related languages, and then leap suddenly across familial gaps to appear in an entirely different family.

The task is further complicated by the fact that languages can be classified along multiple axes. For example, Java is both an object-oriented language (because it encourages object-oriented organization) and a concurrent language (because it contains built-in constructs for running multiple threads in parallel).

In broad strokes, programming languages divide into programming paradigms and a classification by intended domain of use. Traditionally, programming languages have been regarded as describing computation in terms of imperative sentences, i.e. issuing commands. These are generally called imperative programming languages. A great deal of research in programming languages has been aimed at blurring the distinction between a program as a set of instructions and a program as an assertion about the desired answer, which is the main feature of declarative programming.^[39] More refined paradigms include procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, and logic programming; some languages are hybrids of paradigms or multi-paradigmatic. An assembly language is not so much a paradigm as a direct model of an underlying machine architecture. By purpose, programming languages might be considered general purpose, system programming languages, scripting languages, domain-specific languages, or concurrent/distributed languages (or a combination of these).^[40] Some general purpose languages were designed largely with educational goals.^[41]

A programming language may also be classified by factors unrelated to programming paradigm. For instance, most programming languages use English language keywords, while a minority do not. Other languages may be classified as being esoteric or not.

[edit] History

A selection of textbooks that teach programming, in languages both popular and obscure. These are only a few of the thousands of programming languages and dialects that have been designed in history.

[edit] Early developments

The first programming languages predate the modern computer. The 19th century had "programmable" looms and player piano scrolls which implemented what are today recognized as examples of domain-specific languages. By the beginning of the twentieth century, punch cards encoded data and directed mechanical processing. In the 1930s and 1940s, the formalisms of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus and Alan Turing's Turing machines provided mathematical abstractions for expressing algorithms; the lambda calculus remains influential in language design.^[42]

In the 1940s, the first electrically powered digital computers were created. The first high-level programming language to be designed for a computer was Plankalkül, developed for the German Z3 by Konrad Zuse between 1943 and 1945. However, it was not implemented until 1998 and 2000.^[43]

Programmers of early 1950s computers, notably UNIVAC I and IBM 701, used machine language programs, that is, the first generation language (1GL). 1GL programming was quickly superseded by similarly machine-specific, but mnemonic, second generation languages (2GL) known as assembly languages or "assembler". Later in the 1950s, assembly language programming, which had evolved to include the use of macro instructions, was followed by the development of "third generation" programming languages (3GL), such as FORTRAN, LISP, and COBOL.^[44] 3GLs are more abstract and are "portable", or at least implemented similarly on computers that do not support the same native machine code. Updated versions of all of these 3GLs are still in general use, and each has strongly influenced the development of later languages.^[45] At the end of the 1950s, the language formalized as ALGOL 60 was introduced, and most later programming languages are, in many respects, descendants of Algol.^[45] The format and use of the early programming languages was heavily influenced by the constraints of the interface.^[46]

[edit] Refinement

The period from the 1960s to the late 1970s brought the development of the major language paradigms now in use, though many aspects were refinements of ideas in the very first Third-generation programming languages:

• APL introduced array programming and influenced functional programming.^[47]
• PL/I (NPL) was designed in the early 1960s to incorporate the best ideas from FORTRAN and COBOL.
• In the 1960s, Simula was the first language designed to support object-oriented programming; in the mid-1970s, Smalltalk followed with the first "purely" object-oriented language.
• C was developed between 1969 and 1973 as a system programming language, and remains popular.^[48]
• Prolog, designed in 1972, was the first logic programming language.
• In 1978, ML built a polymorphic type system on top of Lisp, pioneering statically typed functional programming languages.

Each of these languages spawned an entire family of descendants, and most modern languages count at least one of them in their ancestry.

The 1960s and 1970s also saw considerable debate over the merits of structured programming, and whether programming languages should be designed to support it.^[49] Edsger Dijkstra, in a famous 1968 letter published in the Communications of the ACM, argued that GOTO statements should be eliminated from all "higher level" programming languages.^[50]

The 1960s and 1970s also saw expansion of techniques that reduced the footprint of a program as well as improved productivity of the programmer and user. The card deck for an early 4GL was a lot smaller for the same functionality expressed in a 3GL deck.

[edit] Consolidation and growth

The 1980s were years of relative consolidation. C++ combined object-oriented and systems programming. The United States government standardized Ada, a systems programming language derived from Pascal and intended for use by defense contractors. In Japan and elsewhere, vast sums were spent investigating so-called "fifth generation" languages that incorporated logic programming constructs.^[51] The functional languages community moved to standardize ML and Lisp. Rather than inventing new paradigms, all of these movements elaborated upon the ideas invented in the previous decade.

One important trend in language design during the 1980s was an increased focus on programming for large-scale systems through the use of modules, or large-scale organizational units of code. Modula-2, Ada, and ML all developed notable module systems in the 1980s, although other languages, such as PL/I, already had extensive support for modular programming. Module systems were often wedded to generic programming constructs.^[52]

The rapid growth of the Internet in the mid-1990s created opportunities for new languages. Perl, originally a Unix scripting tool first released in 1987, became common in dynamic websites. Java came to be used for server-side programming. These developments were not fundamentally novel, rather they were refinements to existing languages and paradigms, and largely based on the C family of programming languages.

Programming language evolution continues, in both industry and research. Current directions include security and reliability verification, new kinds of modularity (mixins, delegates, aspects), and database integration such as Microsoft's LINQ.

The 4GLs are examples of languages which are domain-specific, such as SQL, which manipulates and returns sets of data rather than the scalar values which are canonical to most programming languages. Perl, for example, with its 'here document' can hold multiple 4GL programs, as well as multiple JavaScript programs, in part of its own perl code and use variable interpolation in the 'here document' to support multi-language programming.^[53]

[edit] See also

Computer science portal

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Computer programming

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Programming languages

• Comparison of programming languages (basic instructions)
• Comparison of programming languages
• Computer programming
• Computer science and Outline of computer science
• Educational programming language
• Invariant based programming
• Lists of programming languages
• List of programming language researchers
• Literate programming
• Dialect (computing)
• Programming language theory
• Pseudocode
• Scientific language
• Software engineering and List of software engineering topics

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Daniel P. Friedman, Mitchell Wand, Christopher Thomas Haynes: Essentials of Programming Languages, The MIT Press 2001.
• David Gelernter, Suresh Jagannathan: Programming Linguistics, The MIT Press 1990.
• Shriram Krishnamurthi: Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation, online publication.
• Bruce J. MacLennan: Principles of Programming Languages: Design, Evaluation, and Implementation, Oxford University Press 1999.
• John C. Mitchell: Concepts in Programming Languages, Cambridge University Press 2002.
• Benjamin C. Pierce: Types and Programming Languages, The MIT Press 2002.
• Ravi Sethi: Programming Languages: Concepts and Constructs, 2nd ed., Addison-Wesley 1996.
• Michael L. Scott: Programming Language Pragmatics, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers 2005.
• Richard L. Wexelblat (ed.): History of Programming Languages, Academic Press 1981.

[edit] External links

Look up programming language in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• 99 Bottles of Beer A collection of implementations in many languages.
• Computer Programming Languages at the Open Directory Project
• Syntax Patterns for Various Languages