High-level programming languageIn computer science, a high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. In contrast to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language elements, be easier to use, or may automate (or even hide entirely) significant areas of computing systems (e.g. memory management), making the process of developing a program simpler and more understandable than when using a lower-level language. The amount of abstraction provided defines how "high-level" a programming language is.
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.
Object-oriented programmingObject-Oriented Programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or properties), and the code is in the form of procedures (often known as methods). A common feature of objects is that procedures (or methods) are attached to them and can access and modify the object's data fields. In this brand of OOP, there is usually a special name such as or used to refer to the current object.
Source codeIn computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of text, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source code. The source code is often transformed by an assembler or compiler into binary machine code that can be executed by the computer.
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.
Threaded codeIn computer science, threaded code is a programming technique where the code has a form that essentially consists entirely of calls to subroutines. It is often used in compilers, which may generate code in that form or be implemented in that form themselves. The code may be processed by an interpreter or it may simply be a sequence of machine code call instructions. Threaded code has better density than code generated by alternative generation techniques and by alternative calling conventions.
DisassemblerA disassembler is a computer program that translates machine language into assembly language—the inverse operation to that of an assembler. Disassembly, the output of a disassembler, is often formatted for human-readability rather than suitability for input to an assembler, making it principally a reverse-engineering tool. Common uses of disassemblers include analyzing high-level programing language compilers output and their optimizations, recovering source code of a program whose original source was lost, malware analysis, modifying software (such as ROM hacking), and software cracking.
BytecodeBytecode (also called portable code or p-code) is a form of instruction set designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter. Unlike human-readable source code, bytecodes are compact numeric codes, constants, and references (normally numeric addresses) that encode the result of compiler parsing and performing semantic analysis of things like type, scope, and nesting depths of program objects. The name bytecode stems from instruction sets that have one-byte opcodes followed by optional parameters.
Forth (programming language)Forth is a procedural, stack-oriented programming language and interactive environment designed by Charles H. "Chuck" Moore and first used by other programmers in 1970. Although not an acronym, the language's name in its early years was often spelled in all capital letters as FORTH. The FORTH-79 and FORTH-83 implementations, which were not written by Moore, became de facto standards, and an official standardization of the language was published in 1994 as ANS Forth. A wide range of Forth derivatives existed before and after ANS Forth.
PrologProlog is a logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is intended primarily as a declarative programming language: the program logic is expressed in terms of relations, represented as facts and rules. A computation is initiated by running a query over these relations.
P-code machineIn computer programming, a p-code machine (portable code machine) is a virtual machine designed to execute p-code (the assembly language or machine code of a hypothetical central processing unit (CPU)). This term is applied both generically to all such machines (such as the Java virtual machine (JVM) and MATLAB precompiled code), and to specific implementations, the most famous being the p-Machine of the Pascal-P system, particularly the UCSD Pascal implementation, among whose developers, the p in p-code was construed to mean pseudo more often than portable, thus pseudo-code meaning instructions for a pseudo-machine.
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).
Command-line interfaceA command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with a device or computer program with commands from a user or client, and responses from the device or program, in the form of lines of text. Such access was first provided by computer terminals starting in the mid-1960s. This provided an interactive environment not available with punched cards or other input methods. Operating system command-line interfaces are often implemented with command-line interpreters or command-line processors.
Reserved wordIn a computer language, a reserved word (also known as a reserved identifier) is a word that cannot be used as an identifier, such as the name of a variable, function, or label – it is "reserved from use". This is a syntactic definition, and a reserved word may have no user-defined meaning. A closely related and often conflated notion is a keyword, which is a word with special meaning in a particular context. This is a semantic definition. By contrast, names in a standard library but not built into a language are not considered reserved words or keywords.
Turing completenessIn computability theory, a system of data-manipulation rules (such as a model of computation, a computer's instruction set, a programming language, or a cellular automaton) is said to be Turing-complete or computationally universal if it can be used to simulate any Turing machine (devised by English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing). This means that this system is able to recognize or decide other data-manipulation rule sets. Turing completeness is used as a way to express the power of such a data-manipulation rule set.
Just-in-time compilationIn computing, just-in-time (JIT) compilation (also dynamic translation or run-time compilations) is compilation (of computer code) during execution of a program (at run time) rather than before execution. This may consist of source code translation but is more commonly bytecode translation to machine code, which is then executed directly. A system implementing a JIT compiler typically continuously analyses the code being executed and identifies parts of the code where the speedup gained from compilation or recompilation would outweigh the overhead of compiling that code.
Virtual machineIn computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardware, software, or a combination of the two. Virtual machines differ and are organized by their function, shown here: System virtual machines (also called full virtualization VMs) provide a substitute for a real machine. They provide the functionality needed to execute entire operating systems.
Scripting languageA scripting language or script language is a programming language that is used to manipulate, customize, and automate the facilities of an existing system. Scripting languages are usually interpreted at runtime rather than compiled. A scripting language's primitives are usually elementary tasks or API calls, and the scripting language allows them to be combined into more programs. Environments that can be automated through scripting include application software, text editors, web pages, operating system shells, embedded systems, and computer games.
Scheme (programming language)Scheme is a dialect of the Lisp family of programming languages. Scheme was created during the 1970s at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT AI Lab) and released by its developers, Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman, via a series of memos now known as the Lambda Papers. It was the first dialect of Lisp to choose lexical scope and the first to require implementations to perform tail-call optimization, giving stronger support for functional programming and associated techniques such as recursive algorithms.
Reflective programmingIn computer science, reflective programming or reflection is the ability of a process to examine, introspect, and modify its own structure and behavior. The earliest computers were programmed in their native assembly languages, which were inherently reflective, as these original architectures could be programmed by defining instructions as data and using self-modifying code. As the bulk of programming moved to higher-level compiled languages such as Algol, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, and C, this reflective ability largely disappeared until new programming languages with reflection built into their type systems appeared.
