Nested functionIn computer programming, a nested function (or nested procedure or subroutine) is a function which is defined within another function, the enclosing function. Due to simple recursive scope rules, a nested function is itself invisible outside of its immediately enclosing function, but can see (access) all local objects (data, functions, types, etc.) of its immediately enclosing function as well as of any function(s) which, in turn, encloses that function.
Lua (programming language)Lua (ˈluːə ; from lua ˈlu(w)ɐ meaning moon) is a lightweight, high-level, multi-paradigm programming language designed primarily for embedded use in applications. Lua is cross-platform, since the interpreter of compiled bytecode is written in ANSI C, and Lua has a relatively simple C API to embed it into applications. Lua originated in 1993 as a language for extending software applications to meet the increasing demand for customization at the time.
Lambda calculusLambda calculus (also written as λ-calculus) is a formal system in mathematical logic for expressing computation based on function abstraction and application using variable binding and substitution. It is a universal model of computation that can be used to simulate any Turing machine. It was introduced by the mathematician Alonzo Church in the 1930s as part of his research into the foundations of mathematics. Lambda calculus consists of constructing lambda terms and performing reduction operations on them.
Covariance and contravariance (computer science)Many programming language type systems support subtyping. For instance, if the type is a subtype of , then an expression of type should be substitutable wherever an expression of type is used. Variance is how subtyping between more complex types relates to subtyping between their components. For example, how should a list of s relate to a list of s? Or how should a function that returns relate to a function that returns ? Depending on the variance of the type constructor, the subtyping relation of the simple types may be either preserved, reversed, or ignored for the respective complex types.
Scope (computer science)In computer programming, the scope of a name binding (an association of a name to an entity, such as a variable) is the part of a program where the name binding is valid; that is, where the name can be used to refer to the entity. In other parts of the program, the name may refer to a different entity (it may have a different binding), or to nothing at all (it may be unbound). Scope helps prevent name collisions by allowing the same name to refer to different objects – as long as the names have separate scopes.
Referential transparencyIn analytic philosophy and computer science, referential transparency and referential opacity are properties of linguistic constructions, and by extension of languages. A linguistic construction is called referentially transparent when for any expression built from it, replacing a subexpression with another one that denotes the same value does not change the value of the expression. Otherwise, it is called referentially opaque.
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).
Swift (programming language)Swift is a high-level general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Apple Inc. and the open-source community. First released in June 2014, Swift was developed as a replacement for Apple's earlier programming language Objective-C, as Objective-C had been largely unchanged since the early 1980s and lacked modern language features. Swift works with Apple's Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks, and a key aspect of Swift's design was the ability to interoperate with the huge body of existing Objective-C code developed for Apple products over the previous decades.
Nim (programming language)Nim is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, statically typed, compiled high-level systems programming language, designed and developed by a team around Andreas Rumpf. Nim is designed to be "efficient, expressive, and elegant", supporting metaprogramming, functional, message passing, procedural, and object-oriented programming styles by providing several features such as compile time code generation, algebraic data types, a foreign function interface (FFI) with C, C++, Objective-C, and JavaScript, and supporting compiling to those same languages as intermediate representations.
Functional programmingIn computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. It is a declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that map values to other values, rather than a sequence of imperative statements which update the running state of the program. In functional programming, functions are treated as first-class citizens, meaning that they can be bound to names (including local identifiers), passed as arguments, and returned from other functions, just as any other data type can.
Type signatureIn computer science, a type signature or type annotation defines the inputs and outputs for a function, subroutine or method. A type signature includes the number, types, and order of the arguments contained by a function. A type signature is typically used during overload resolution for choosing the correct definition of a function to be called among many overloaded forms. In C and C++, the type signature is declared by what is commonly known as a function prototype.
R (programming language)R is a programming language for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Core Team and the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Created by statisticians Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, R is used among data miners, bioinformaticians and statisticians for data analysis and developing statistical software. The core R language is augmented by a large number of extension packages containing reusable code and documentation. According to user surveys and studies of scholarly literature databases, R is one of the most commonly used programming languages in data mining.