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1,901 | There are some situations in which developers might choose to use assembly language: |
1,902 | Assembly language is still taught in most computer science and electronic engineering programs. Although few programmers today regularly work with assembly language as a tool, the underlying concepts remain important. Such fundamental topics as binary arithmetic, memory allocation, stack processing, character set encod... |
1,903 | In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that occurs naturally in a human community by a process of use, repetition, and change without conscious planning or premeditation. It can take different forms, namely either a spoken language or a sign ... |
1,904 | Natural language can be broadly defined as different from |
1,905 | All varieties of world languages are natural languages, including those that are associated with linguistic prescriptivism or language regulation. An official language with a regulating academy such as Standard French, overseen by the Académie Française, is classified as a natural language , as its prescriptive aspect... |
1,906 | Controlled natural languages are subsets of natural languages whose grammars and dictionaries have been restricted in order to reduce ambiguity and complexity. This may be accomplished by decreasing usage of superlative or adverbial forms, or irregular verbs. Typical purposes for developing and implementing a controlle... |
1,907 | Being constructed, International auxiliary languages such as Esperanto and Interlingua are not considered natural languages, with the possible exception of true native speakers of such languages. Natural languages evolve, through fluctuations in vocabulary and syntax, to incrementally improve human communication. In co... |
1,908 | Some natural languages have become organically "standardized" through the synthesis of two or more pre-existing natural languages over a relatively short period of time through the development of a pidgin, which is not considered a language, into a stable creole language. A creole such as Haitian Creole has its own gra... |
1,909 | As of 1996, there were 350 attested families with one or more native speakers of Esperanto. Latino sine flexione, another international auxiliary language, is no longer widely spoken. |
1,910 | A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. |
1,911 | Programming languages are described in terms of their syntax and semantics , usually defined by a formal language. Languages usually provide features such as a type system, variables and mechanisms for error handling. An implementation of a programming language in the form of a compiler or interpreter allows programs ... |
1,912 | Computer architecture has strongly influenced the design of programming languages, with the most common type developed to perform well on the popular von Neumann architecture. While early programming languages were closely tied to the hardware, over time, they have developed more abstraction to hide implementation det... |
1,913 | Thousands of programming languages—often classified as imperative, functional, logic, or object-oriented—have been developed for a wide variety of uses. Many aspects of programming language design involve tradeoffs—for example, exception handling simplifies error handling, but at a performance cost. Programming languag... |
1,914 | There are a variety of criteria that may be considered when defining what constitutes a programming language. |
1,915 | The term computer language is sometimes used interchangeably with programming language. 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. Similarly, languages used in computing that have a different goal... |
1,916 | 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. John C. Reynolds emphasizes that formal specification languages are just as much programming languag... |
1,917 | In most practical contexts, a programming language involves a computer; consequently, programming languages are usually defined and studied this way. Programming languages differ from natural languages in that natural languages are only used for interaction between people, while programming languages also allow humans ... |
1,918 | The domain of the language is also worth consideration. Markup languages like XML, HTML, or troff, which define structured data, are not usually considered programming languages. Programming languages may, however, share the syntax with markup languages if a computational semantics is defined. XSLT, for example, is a T... |
1,919 | Programming languages usually contain abstractions for defining and manipulating data structures or controlling the flow of execution. The practical necessity that a programming language supports adequate abstractions is expressed by the abstraction principle. This principle is sometimes formulated as a recommendation ... |
1,920 | The first programmable computers were invented at the end of the 1940s, and with them, the first programming languages. The earliest computers were programmed in first-generation programming languages , machine language . This code was very difficult to debug and was not portable between different computer systems. In ... |
1,921 | Initially, hardware resources were scarce and expensive, while human resources were cheaper. Therefore, cumbersome languages that were time-consuming to use, but were closer to the hardware for higher efficiency were favored. The introduction of high-level programming languages —revolutionized programming. These langua... |
1,922 | Around 1960, the first mainframes—general purpose computers—were developed, although they could only be operated by professionals and the cost was extreme. The data and instructions were input by punch cards, meaning that no input could be added while the program was running. The languages developed at this time theref... |
1,923 | Lisp, implemented in 1958, was the first functional programming language. Unlike Fortran, it supports recursion and conditional expressions, and it also introduced dynamic memory management on a heap and automatic garbage collection. For the next decades, Lisp dominated artificial intelligence applications. In 1978, an... |
1,924 | After ALGOL was released in 1958 and 1960, it became the standard in computing literature for describing algorithms. Although its commercial success was limited, most popular imperative languages—including C, Pascal, Ada, C++, Java, and C#—are directly or indirectly descended from ALGOL 60. Among its innovations adopt... |
1,925 | Prolog, designed in 1972, was the first logic programming language, communicating with a computer using formal logic notation. With logic programming, the programmer specifies a desired result and allows the interpreter to decide how to achieve it. |
1,926 | During the 1980s, the invention of the personal computer transformed the roles for which programming languages were used. New languages introduced in the 1980s included C++, a superset of C that can compile C programs but also supports classes and inheritance. Ada and other new languages introduced support for concurre... |
1,927 | Due to the rapid growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s, new programming languages were introduced to support Web pages and networking. Java, based on C++ and designed for increased portability across systems and security, enjoyed large-scale success because these features are essential for many Int... |
1,928 | During the 2000s, there was a slowdown in the development of new programming languages that achieved widespread popularity. One innovation was service-oriented programming, designed to exploit distributed systems whose components are connected by a network. Services are similar to objects in object-oriented programming... |
1,929 | Some of the new programming languages are classified as visual programming languages like Scratch, LabVIEW and PWCT. Also, some of these languages mix between textual and visual programming usage like Ballerina. Also, this trend lead to developing projects that help in developing new VPLs like Blockly by Google.Many ga... |
1,930 | All programming languages have some primitive building blocks for the description of data and the processes or transformations applied to them . These primitives are defined by syntactic and semantic rules which describe their structure and meaning respectively. |
1,931 | A programming language's surface form is known as its syntax. Most programming languages are purely textual; they use sequences of text including words, numbers, and punctuation, much like written natural languages. On the other hand, some programming languages are more graphical in nature, using visual relationships b... |
1,932 | The syntax of a language describes the possible combinations of symbols that form a syntactically correct program. The meaning given to a combination of symbols is handled by semantics . Since most languages are textual, this article discusses textual syntax. |
1,933 | The programming language syntax is usually defined using a combination of regular expressions and Backus–Naur form . Below is a simple grammar, based on Lisp: |
1,934 | This grammar specifies the following: |
1,935 | The following are examples of well-formed token sequences in this grammar: 12345, and ). |
1,936 | Not all syntactically correct programs are semantically correct. Many syntactically correct programs are nonetheless ill-formed, per the language's rules; and may result in an error on translation or execution. In some cases, such programs may exhibit undefined behavior. Even when a program is well-defined within a la... |
1,937 | Using natural language as an example, it may not be possible to assign a meaning to a grammatically correct sentence or the sentence may be false: |
1,938 | The following C language fragment is syntactically correct, but performs operations that are not semantically defined : |
1,939 | If the type declaration on the first line were omitted, the program would trigger an error on the undefined variable p during compilation. However, the program would still be syntactically correct since type declarations provide only semantic information. |
1,940 | The grammar needed to specify a programming language can be classified by its position in the Chomsky hierarchy. The syntax of most programming languages can be specified using a Type-2 grammar, i.e., they are context-free grammars. Some languages, including Perl and Lisp, contain constructs that allow execution during... |
1,941 | The term semantics refers to the meaning of languages, as opposed to their form . |
1,942 | Static semantics defines restrictions on the structure of valid texts that are hard or impossible to express in standard syntactic formalisms. For compiled languages, static semantics essentially include those semantic rules that can be checked at compile time. Examples include checking that every identifier is declare... |
1,943 | Once data has been specified, the machine must be instructed to perform operations on the data. For example, the semantics may define the strategy by which expressions are evaluated to values, or the manner in which control structures conditionally execute statements. The dynamic semantics of a language defines how an... |
1,944 | A type system defines how a programming language classifies values and expressions into types, how it can manipulate those types and how they interact. The goal of a type system is to verify and usually enforce a certain level of correctness in programs written in that language by detecting certain incorrect operations... |
1,945 | A language is typed if the specification of every operation defines types of data to which the operation is applicable. For example, the data represented by "this text between the quotes" is a string, and in many programming languages, dividing a number by a string has no meaning and will not be executed. The invalid o... |
1,946 | A special case of typed languages is the single-typed languages. These are often scripting or markup languages, such as REXX or SGML, and have only one data type–—most commonly character strings which are used for both symbolic and numeric data. |
1,947 | In contrast, an untyped language, such as most assembly languages, allows any operation to be performed on any data, generally sequences of bits of various lengths. High-level untyped languages include BCPL, Tcl, and some varieties of Forth. |
1,948 | In practice, while few languages are considered typed from the type theory , most modern languages offer a degree of typing. Many production languages provide means to bypass or subvert the type system, trading type safety for finer control over the program's execution . |
1,949 | In static typing, all expressions have their types determined before a program executes, typically at compile-time. For example, 1 and are integer expressions; they cannot be passed to a function that expects a string or stored in a variable that is defined to hold dates. |
1,950 | Statically-typed languages can be either manifestly typed or type-inferred. In the first case, the programmer must explicitly write types at certain textual positions . In the second case, the compiler infers the types of expressions and declarations based on context. Most mainstream statically-typed languages, such as... |
1,951 | Dynamic typing, also called latent typing, determines the type-safety of operations at run time; in other words, types are associated with run-time values rather than textual expressions. As with type-inferred languages, dynamically-typed languages do not require the programmer to write explicit type annotations on exp... |
1,952 | Weak typing allows a value of one type to be treated as another, for example treating a string as a number. This can occasionally be useful, but it can also allow some kinds of program faults to go undetected at compile time and even at run time. |
1,953 | Strong typing prevents these program faults. An attempt to perform an operation on the wrong type of value raises an error. Strongly-typed languages are often termed type-safe or safe. |
1,954 | An alternative definition for "weakly typed" refers to languages, such as Perl, Ring and JavaScript, which permit a large number of implicit type conversions. In JavaScript, for example, the expression 2 * x implicitly converts x to a number, and this conversion succeeds even if x is null, undefined, an Array, or a str... |
1,955 | It may seem odd to some professional programmers that C could be "weakly, statically typed". However, the use of the generic pointer, the void* pointer, does allow casting pointers to other pointers without needing to do an explicit cast. This is extremely similar to somehow casting an array of bytes to any kind of dat... |
1,956 | Most programming languages have an associated core library , which is conventionally made available by all implementations of the language. Core libraries typically include definitions for commonly used algorithms, data structures, and mechanisms for input and output. |
1,957 | The line between a language and its core library differs from language to language. In some cases, the language designers may treat the library as a separate entity from the language. However, a language's core library is often treated as part of the language by its users, and some language specifications even require ... |
1,958 | In computing, multiple instructions can be executed simultaneously. Many programming languages support instruction-level and subprogram-level concurrency. By the twenty-first century, additional processing power on computers was increasingly coming from the use of additional processors, which requires programmers to de... |
1,959 | Many programming languages include exception handlers, a section of code triggered by runtime errors that can deal with them in two main ways: |
1,960 | Some programming languages support dedicating a block of code to run regardless of whether an exception occurs before the code is reached; this is called finalization. |
1,961 | There is a tradeoff between increased ability to handle exceptions and reduced performance. For example, even though array index errors are common C does not check them for performance reasons. Although programmers can write code to catch user-defined exceptions, this can clutter a program. Standard libraries in some ... |
1,962 | 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. But as artificial constructs, they also differ in fundamental ways fro... |
1,963 | Many programming languages have been designed from scratch, altered to meet new needs, and combined with other languages. Many have 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 a... |
1,964 | 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 tha... |
1,965 | Natural-language programming has 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... |
1,966 | 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. |
1,967 | The specification of a programming language is an artifact that the language users and the implementors can use to agree upon whether a piece of source code is a valid program in that language, and if so what its behavior shall be. |
1,968 | A programming language specification can take several forms, including the following: |
1,969 | An implementation of a programming language provides a way to write programs in that language and execute them 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 langua... |
1,970 | 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 one line at a time... |
1,971 | Programs that are executed directly on the hardware usually run much faster than those that are interpreted in software. |
1,972 | 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. |
1,973 | Although most of the most commonly used programming languages have fully open specifications and implementations, many programming languages exist only as proprietary programming languages with the implementation available only from a single vendor, which may claim that such a proprietary language is their intellectual... |
1,974 | Some programming languages exist on the border between proprietary and open; for example, Oracle Corporation asserts proprietary rights to some aspects of the Java programming language, and Microsoft's C# programming language, which has open implementations of most parts of the system, also has Common Language Runtime ... |
1,975 | Many proprietary languages are widely used, in spite of their proprietary nature; examples include MATLAB, VBScript, and Wolfram Language. Some languages may make the transition from closed to open; for example, Erlang was originally Ericsson's internal programming language. |
1,976 | Open source programming languages are particularly helpful for open science applications, enhancing the capacity for replication and code sharing. |
1,977 | Thousands of different programming languages have been created, mainly in the computing field.
Individual software projects commonly use five programming languages or more. |
1,978 | 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. H... |
1,979 | 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 ... |
1,980 | 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 can run its commands through an interpreter , without c... |
1,981 | Determining which is the most widely used programming language is difficult since the definition of usage varies by context. One language may occupy the greater number of programmer hours, a different one has more lines of code, and a third may consume the most CPU time. Some languages are very popular for particular k... |
1,982 | Various methods of measuring language popularity, each subject to a different bias over what is measured, have been proposed: |
1,983 | Combining and averaging information from various internet sites, stackify.com reported the ten most popular programming languages : Java, C, C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, VB .NET, R, PHP, and MATLAB. |
1,984 | As of February 2024, the top five programming languages as measured by TIOBE index are Python, C, C++, Java and C#. TIOBE provide a list of top 100 programming languages according to popularity and update this list every month. |
1,985 | A dialect of a programming language or a data exchange language is a variation or extension of the language that does not change its intrinsic nature. With languages such as Scheme and Forth, standards may be considered insufficient, inadequate, or illegitimate by implementors, so often they will deviate from the stan... |
1,986 | Programming languages are often placed into four main categories: imperative, functional, logic, and object oriented. |
1,987 | Although markup languages are not programming languages, some have extensions that support limited programming. Additionally, there are special-purpose languages that are not easily compared to other programming languages. |
1,988 | In computer programming, assembly language , often referred to simply as assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence between the instructions in the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. Assembly language usually has one ... |
1,989 | The first assembly code in which a language is used to represent machine code instructions is found in Kathleen and Andrew Donald Booth's 1947 work, Coding for A.R.C.. Assembly code is converted into executable machine code by a utility program referred to as an assembler. The term "assembler" is generally attributed t... |
1,990 | Because assembly depends on the machine code instructions, each assembly language is specific to a particular computer architecture. |
1,991 | Sometimes there is more than one assembler for the same architecture, and sometimes an assembler is specific to an operating system or to particular operating systems. Most assembly languages do not provide specific syntax for operating system calls, and most assembly languages can be used universally with any operatin... |
1,992 | In the first decades of computing, it was commonplace for both systems programming and application programming to take place entirely in assembly language. While still irreplaceable for some purposes, the majority of programming is now conducted in higher-level interpreted and compiled languages. In "No Silver Bullet... |
1,993 | Today, it is typical to use small amounts of assembly language code within larger systems implemented in a higher-level language, for performance reasons or to interact directly with hardware in ways unsupported by the higher-level language. For instance, just under 2% of version 4.9 of the Linux kernel source code is... |
1,994 | Assembly language uses a mnemonic to represent, e.g., each low-level machine instruction or opcode, each directive, typically also each architectural register, flag, etc. Some of the mnemonics may be built in and some user defined. Many operations require one or more operands in order to form a complete instruction. Mo... |
1,995 | Some are column oriented, with specific fields in specific columns; this was very common for machines using punched cards in the 1950s and early 1960s. Some assemblers have free-form syntax, with fields separated by delimiters, e.g., punctuation, white space. Some assemblers are hybrid, with, e.g., labels, in a specifi... |
1,996 | An assembler program creates object code by translating combinations of mnemonics and syntax for operations and addressing modes into their numerical equivalents. This representation typically includes an operation code as well as other control bits and data. The assembler also calculates constant expressions and reso... |
1,997 | Some assemblers may also be able to perform some simple types of instruction set-specific optimizations. One concrete example of this may be the ubiquitous x86 assemblers from various vendors. Called jump-sizing, most of them are able to perform jump-instruction replacements in any number of passes, on request. Others... |
1,998 | Assemblers have been available since the 1950s, as the first step above machine language and before high-level programming languages such as Fortran, Algol, COBOL and Lisp. There have also been several classes of translators and semi-automatic code generators with properties similar to both assembly and high-level lang... |
1,999 | There may be several assemblers with different syntax for a particular CPU or instruction set architecture. For instance, an instruction to add memory data to a register in a x86-family processor might be add eax,, in original Intel syntax, whereas this would be written addl ,%eax in the AT&T syntax used by the GNU Ass... |
2,000 | There are two types of assemblers based on how many passes through the source are needed to produce the object file. |
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