Mercury (programming language)Mercury is a functional logic programming language made for real-world uses. The first version was developed at the University of Melbourne, Computer Science department, by Fergus Henderson, Thomas Conway, and Zoltan Somogyi, under Somogyi's supervision, and released on April 8, 1995. Mercury is a purely declarative logic programming language. It is related to both Prolog and Haskell. It features a strong, static, polymorphic type system, and a strong mode and determinism system.
Rust (programming language)Rust is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language that emphasizes performance, type safety, and concurrency. It enforces memory safety—ensuring that all references point to valid memory—without requiring the use of a garbage collector or reference counting present in other memory-safe languages. To simultaneously enforce memory safety and prevent data races, its "borrow checker" tracks the object lifetime of all references in a program during compilation.
PoplogPoplog is an open source, reflective, incrementally compiled software development environment for the programming languages POP-11, Common Lisp, Prolog, and Standard ML, originally created in the UK for teaching and research in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sussex, and later marketed as a commercial package for software development as well as for teaching and research. It was one of the initiatives supported for a while by the UK government-funded Alvey Programme.
Scala (programming language)Scala (ˈskɑːlə ) is a strong statically typed high-level general-purpose programming language that supports both object-oriented programming and functional programming. Designed to be concise, many of Scala's design decisions are aimed to address criticisms of Java. Scala source code can be compiled to Java bytecode and run on a Java virtual machine (JVM). Scala can also be compiled to JavaScript to run in a browser, or directly to a native executable.
Type systemIn computer programming, a type system is a logical system comprising a set of rules that assigns a property called a type (for example, integer, floating point, string) to every "term" (a word, phrase, or other set of symbols). Usually the terms are various constructs of a computer program, such as variables, expressions, functions, or modules. A type system dictates the operations that can be performed on a term. For variables, the type system determines the allowed values of that term.
HaskellHaskell (ˈhæskəl) is a general-purpose, statically-typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Designed for teaching, research, and industrial applications, Haskell has pioneered a number of programming language features such as type classes, which enable type-safe operator overloading, and monadic input/output (IO). It is named after logician Haskell Curry. Haskell's main implementation is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC).
Side effect (computer science)In computer science, an operation, function or expression is said to have a side effect if it modifies some state variable value(s) outside its local environment, which is to say if it has any observable effect other than its primary effect of returning a value to the invoker of the operation. Example side effects include modifying a non-local variable, modifying a static local variable, modifying a mutable argument passed by reference, performing I/O or calling other functions with side-effects.
Lazy evaluationIn programming language theory, lazy evaluation, or call-by-need, is an evaluation strategy which delays the evaluation of an expression until its value is needed (non-strict evaluation) and which also avoids repeated evaluations (by the use of sharing). The benefits of lazy evaluation include: The ability to define control flow (structures) as abstractions instead of primitives. The ability to define potentially infinite data structures. This allows for more straightforward implementation of some algorithms.
Go (programming language)Go is a statically typed, compiled high-level programming language designed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. It is syntactically similar to C, but also has memory safety, garbage collection, structural typing, and CSP-style concurrency. It is often referred to as Golang because of its former domain name, golang.org, but its proper name is Go. There are two major implementations: Google's self-hosting "gc" compiler toolchain, targeting multiple operating systems and WebAssembly.
Generic programmingGeneric programming is a style of computer programming in which algorithms are written in terms of data types to-be-specified-later that are then instantiated when needed for specific types provided as parameters. This approach, pioneered by the ML programming language in 1973, permits writing common functions or types that differ only in the set of types on which they operate when used, thus reducing duplicate code. Generics was introduced to the main-stream programming with Ada in 1977 and then with templates in C++ it became part of the repertoire of professional library design.
Anonymous functionIn computer programming, an anonymous function (function literal, lambda abstraction, lambda function, lambda expression or block) is a function definition that is not bound to an identifier. Anonymous functions are often arguments being passed to higher-order functions or used for constructing the result of a higher-order function that needs to return a function. If the function is only used once, or a limited number of times, an anonymous function may be syntactically lighter than using a named function.
Strong and weak typingIn computer programming, one of the many ways that programming languages are colloquially classified is whether the language's type system makes it strongly typed or weakly typed (loosely typed). However, there is no precise technical definition of what the terms mean and different authors disagree about the implied meaning of the terms and the relative rankings of the "strength" of the type systems of mainstream programming languages.
F Sharp (programming language)F# (pronounced F sharp) is a functional-first, general-purpose, strongly typed, multi-paradigm programming language that encompasses functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming methods. It is most often used as a cross-platform Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) language on .NET, but can also generate JavaScript and graphics processing unit (GPU) code. F# is developed by the F# Software Foundation, Microsoft and open contributors. An open source, cross-platform compiler for F# is available from the F# Software Foundation.
Tail callIn computer science, a tail call is a subroutine call performed as the final action of a procedure. If the target of a tail is the same subroutine, the subroutine is said to be tail recursive, which is a special case of direct recursion. Tail recursion (or tail-end recursion) is particularly useful, and is often easy to optimize in implementations. Tail calls can be implemented without adding a new stack frame to the call stack.
Parametric polymorphismIn programming languages and type theory, parametric polymorphism allows a single piece of code to be given a "generic" type, using variables in place of actual types, and then instantiated with particular types as needed. Parametrically polymorphic functions and data types are sometimes called generic functions and generic datatypes, respectively, and they form the basis of generic programming. Parametric polymorphism may be contrasted with ad hoc polymorphism.
OCamlOCaml (oʊˈkæməl , formerly Objective Caml) is a general-purpose, high-level multi-paradigm programming language which extends the Caml dialect of ML with object-oriented features. OCaml was created in 1996 by Xavier Leroy, Jérôme Vouillon, Damien Doligez, Didier Rémy, Ascánder Suárez, and others. The OCaml toolchain includes an interactive top-level interpreter, a bytecode compiler, an optimizing native code compiler, a reversible debugger, and a package manager (OPAM).
Control flowIn computer science, control flow (or flow of control) is the order in which individual statements, instructions or function calls of an imperative program are executed or evaluated. The emphasis on explicit control flow distinguishes an imperative programming language from a declarative programming language. Within an imperative programming language, a control flow statement is a statement that results in a choice being made as to which of two or more paths to follow.
Algebraic data typeIn computer programming, especially functional programming and type theory, an algebraic data type (ADT) is a kind of composite type, i.e., a type formed by combining other types. Two common classes of algebraic types are product types (i.e., tuples and records) and sum types (i.e., tagged or disjoint unions, coproduct types or variant types). The values of a product type typically contain several values, called fields. All values of that type have the same combination of field types.
Type safetyIn computer science, type safety and type soundness are the extent to which a programming language discourages or prevents type errors. Type safety is sometimes alternatively considered to be a property of facilities of a computer language; that is, some facilities are type-safe and their usage will not result in type errors, while other facilities in the same language may be type-unsafe and a program using them may encounter type errors.
General-purpose programming languageIn computer software, a general-purpose programming language (GPL) is a programming language for building software in a wide variety of application domains. Conversely, a domain-specific programming language (DSL) is used within a specific area. For example, Python is a GPL, while SQL is a DSL for querying relational databases. Early programming languages were designed for scientific computing (numerical calculations) or commercial data processing, as was computer hardware.
