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Programming language
A programming language is a system of
notation for writing computer programs.[1]
Most programming languages are text-based
formal languages, but they may also be
graphical. They are a kind of computer
language.

The description of a programming language is

usually split into the two components of syntax
(form) and semantics (meaning), which are
usually defined by a formal language. Some
languages are defined by a specification
document (for example, the C programming
language is specified by an ISO Standard)
while other languages (such as Perl) have a
dominant implementation that is treated as a
reference. Some languages have both, with the The source code for a simple computer program written in
basic language defined by a standard and the C programming language. The gray lines are comments
extensions taken from the dominant that help explain the program to humans in a natural
implementation being common. language. When compiled and run, it will give the output
"Hello, world!".
Programming language theory is the subfield
of computer science that studies the design,
implementation, analysis, characterization, and classification of programming languages.

Definitions
There are many considerations when defining what constitutes a programming language.

Computer languages vs programming languages

The term computer language is sometimes used interchangeably with programming language.[2]
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.[3] Similarly, 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.[4] One way of classifying
computer languages is by the computations they are capable of expressing, as described by the theory
of computation. The majority of practical programming languages are Turing complete,[5] and all
Turing complete languages can implement the same set of algorithms. ANSI/ISO SQL-92 and Charity

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are examples of languages that are not Turing complete, yet are often called programming
languages.[6][7] However, some authors restrict the term "programming language" to Turing complete
languages.[1][8]

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.[9] 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.[10]

Domain and target

In most practical contexts, a programming language involves a computer; consequently,

programming languages are usually defined and studied this way.[11] 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.

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.[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 language entirely using XML
syntax.[15][16][17] Moreover, LaTeX, which is mostly used for structuring documents, also contains a
Turing complete subset.[18][19]

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.[20] This principle is sometimes
formulated as a recommendation to the programmer to make proper use of such abstractions.[21]

History

Early developments

Very early computers, such as Colossus, were programmed without the help of a stored program, by
modifying their circuitry or setting banks of physical controls.

Slightly later, programs could be written in machine language, where the programmer writes each
instruction in a numeric form the hardware can execute directly. For example, the instruction to add
the value in two memory locations might consist of 3 numbers: an "opcode" that selects the "add"
operation, and two memory locations. The programs, in decimal or binary form, were read in from
punched cards, paper tape, magnetic tape or toggled in on switches on the front panel of the
computer. Machine languages were later termed first-generation programming languages (1GL).

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The next step was the development of the so-called second-generation programming languages
(2GL) or assembly languages, which were still closely tied to the instruction set architecture of the
specific computer. These served to make the program much more human-readable and relieved the
programmer of tedious and error-prone address calculations.

The first high-level programming languages, or third-generation programming languages (3GL),

were written in the 1950s. An early 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.[22]

John Mauchly's Short Code, proposed in 1949, was one of the first high-level languages ever
developed for an electronic computer.[23] Unlike machine code, Short Code statements represented
mathematical expressions in an understandable form. However, the program had to be translated into
machine code every time it ran, making the process much slower than running the equivalent
machine code.

At the University of Manchester, Alick Glennie developed Autocode in the early 1950s. As a
programming language, it used a compiler to automatically convert the language into machine code.
The first code and compiler was developed in 1952 for the Mark 1 computer at the University of
Manchester and is considered to be the first compiled high-level programming language.[24][25]

The second auto code was developed for the Mark 1 by R. A. Brooker in 1954 and was called the "Mark
1 Autocode". Brooker also developed an auto code for the Ferranti Mercury in the 1950s in
conjunction with the University of Manchester. The version for the EDSAC 2 was devised by D. F.
Hartley of University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in 1961. Known as EDSAC 2 Autocode,
it was a straight development from Mercury Autocode adapted for local circumstances and was noted
for its object code optimization and source-language diagnostics which were advanced for the time. A
contemporary but separate thread of development, Atlas Autocode was developed for the University
of Manchester Atlas 1 machine.

In 1954, FORTRAN was invented at IBM by John Backus. It was the first widely used high-level
general-purpose programming language to have a functional implementation, as opposed to just a
design on paper.[26][27] It is still a popular language for high-performance computing[28] and is used
for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.[29]

Another early programming language was devised by Grace Hopper in the US, called FLOW-MATIC.
It was developed for the UNIVAC I at Remington Rand during the period from 1955 until 1959.
Hopper found that business data processing customers were uncomfortable with mathematical
notation, and in early 1955, she and her team wrote a specification for an English programming
language and implemented a prototype.[30] The FLOW-MATIC compiler became publicly available in
early 1958 and was substantially complete in 1959.[31] FLOW-MATIC was a major influence in the
design of COBOL, since only it and its direct descendant AIMACO were in actual use at the time.[32]

Refinement

The increased use of high-level languages introduced a requirement for low-level programming
languages or system programming languages. These languages, to varying degrees, provide facilities
between assembly languages and high-level languages. They can be used to perform tasks that require
direct access to hardware facilities but still provide higher-level control structures and error-checking.

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The period from the 1960s to the late 1970s brought the development of the major language
paradigms now in use:

APL introduced array programming and influenced functional programming.[33]

ALGOL refined both structured procedural programming and the discipline of language
specification; the "Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60" became a model for
how later language specifications were written.
Lisp, implemented in 1958, was the first dynamically-typed functional programming language.
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 for the Unix
operating system and remains popular.[34]
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 descendants, and most modern programming 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.[35] 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.[36]

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 the so-
called "fifth-generation" languages that incorporated logic
programming constructs.[37] 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 decades.

One important trend in language design for programming large-scale

systems during the 1980s was an increased focus on the use of
modules or large-scale organizational units of code. Modula-2, Ada,
and ML all developed notable module systems in the 1980s, which A small selection of
were often wedded to generic programming constructs.[38] programming language
textbooks
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, and bytecode virtual machines became popular again in commercial settings with their
promise of "Write once, run anywhere" (UCSD Pascal had been popular for a time in the early 1980s).

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These developments were not fundamentally novel; rather, they were refinements of many existing
languages and paradigms (although their syntax was often 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.

Fourth-generation programming languages (4GL) are computer programming languages that aim to
provide a higher level of abstraction of the internal computer hardware details than 3GLs. Fifth-
generation programming languages (5GL) are programming languages based on solving problems
using constraints given to the program, rather than using an algorithm written by a programmer.

Elements
All programming languages have some primitive building blocks for the description of data and the
processes or transformations applied to them (like the addition of two numbers or the selection of an
item from a collection). These primitives are defined by syntactic and semantic rules which describe
their structure and meaning respectively.

Syntax

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 between
symbols to specify a program.

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 (either formal or hard-coded in
Parse tree of Python code with inset tokenization
a reference implementation). Since most
languages are textual, this article discusses
textual syntax.

The programming language syntax is usually defined using a combination of regular expressions (for
lexical structure) and Backus–Naur form (for grammatical structure). Below is a simple grammar,
based on Lisp:

expression ::= atom | list

atom ::= number | symbol
number ::= [+-]?['0'-'9']+
symbol ::= ['A'-'Z''a'-'z'].*
list ::= '(' expression* ')'

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This grammar specifies the following:

an expression is either an atom or a list;

an atom is either a number or a symbol;
a number is an unbroken sequence of one or more
decimal digits, optionally preceded by a plus or
minus sign;
a symbol is a letter followed by zero or more of any
characters (excluding whitespace); and
a list is a matched pair of parentheses, with zero or
more expressions inside it.

The following are examples of well-formed token Syntax highlighting is often used to aid
sequences in this grammar: 12345, () and (a b c232 programmers in recognizing elements of source
(1)). code. The language above is Python.

Not all syntactically correct programs are semantically

correct. Many syntactically correct programs are nonetheless ill-formed, per the language's rules; and
may (depending on the language specification and the soundness of the implementation) 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 language, it may still have a meaning that is not
intended by the person who wrote it.

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:

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." is grammatically well-formed but has no generally
accepted meaning.
"John is a married bachelor." is grammatically well-formed but expresses a meaning that cannot
be true.

The following C language fragment is syntactically correct, but performs operations that are not
semantically defined (the operation *p >> 4 has no meaning for a value having a complex type and
p->im is not defined because the value of p is the null pointer):

complex *p = NULL;
complex abs_p = sqrt(*p >> 4 + p->im);

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.

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.[39] Some languages, including Perl and Lisp, contain
constructs that allow execution during the parsing phase. Languages that have constructs that allow
the programmer to alter the behavior of the parser make syntax analysis an undecidable problem, and

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generally blur the distinction between parsing and execution.[40] In contrast to Lisp's macro system
and Perl's BEGIN blocks, which may contain general computations, C macros are merely string
replacements and do not require code execution.[41]

Semantics

The term semantics refers to the meaning of languages, as opposed to their form (syntax).

Static semantics

A static semantics defines restrictions on the structure of valid texts that are hard or impossible to
express in standard syntactic formalisms.[1] For compiled languages, static semantics essentially
include those semantic rules that can be checked at compile time. Examples include checking that
every identifier is declared before it is used (in languages that require such declarations) or that the
labels on the arms of a case statement are distinct.[42] Many important restrictions of this type, like
checking that identifiers are used in the appropriate context (e.g. not adding an integer to a function
name), or that subroutine calls have the appropriate number and type of arguments, can be enforced
by defining them as rules in a logic called a type system. Other forms of static analyses like data flow
analysis may also be part of static semantics. Newer programming languages like Java and C# have
definite assignment analysis, a form of data flow analysis, as part of their static semantics.

Dynamic semantics

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 (also
known as execution semantics) of a language defines how and when the various constructs of a
language should produce a program behavior. There are many ways of defining execution semantics.
Natural language is often used to specify the execution semantics of languages commonly used in
practice. A significant amount of academic research went into formal semantics of programming
languages, which allows execution semantics to be specified in a formal manner. Results from this
field of research have seen limited application to programming language design and implementation
outside academia.

Type system

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. Any decidable type system involves a trade-off: while it rejects many incorrect
programs, it can also prohibit some correct, albeit unusual programs. In order to bypass this
downside, a number of languages have type loopholes, usually unchecked casts that may be used by
the programmer to explicitly allow a normally disallowed operation between different types. In most

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typed languages, the type system is used only to type check programs, but a number of languages,
usually functional ones, infer types, relieving the programmer from the need to write type
annotations. The formal design and study of type systems is known as type theory.

Typed versus untyped languages

A language is typed if the specification of every operation defines types of data to which the operation
is applicable.[43] 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 operation may be detected when the program is compiled ("static" type
checking) and will be rejected by the compiler with a compilation error message, or it may be detected
while the program is running ("dynamic" type checking), resulting in a run-time exception. Many
languages allow a function called an exception handler to handle this exception and, for example,
always return "-1" as the result.

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.

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.[43] High-level untyped
languages include BCPL, Tcl, and some varieties of Forth.

In practice, while few languages are considered typed from the type theory (verifying or rejecting all
operations), most modern languages offer a degree of typing.[43] Many production languages provide
means to bypass or subvert the type system, trading type safety for finer control over the program's
execution (see casting).

Static vis-à-vis dynamic typing

In static typing, all expressions have their types determined prior to when the program is executed,
typically at compile-time. For example, 1 and (2+2) 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.[43]

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 (for example, at variable
declarations). In the second case, the compiler infers the types of expressions and declarations based
on context. Most mainstream statically-typed languages, such as C++, C# and Java, are manifestly
typed. Complete type inference has traditionally been associated with functional languages such as
Haskell and ML.[44] However, many manifestly-typed languages support partial type inference; for
example, C++, Java, and C# all infer types in certain limited cases.[45] Additionally, some
programming languages allow for some types to be automatically converted to other types; for
example, an int can be used where the program expects a float.

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.[43] As with
type-inferred languages, dynamically-typed languages do not require the programmer to write explicit
type annotations on expressions. Among other things, this may permit a single variable to refer to
values of different types at different points in the program execution. However, type errors cannot be

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automatically detected until a piece of code is actually executed, potentially making debugging more
difficult. Lisp, Smalltalk, Perl, Python, JavaScript, and Ruby are all examples of dynamically-typed
languages.

Weak and strong typing

Weak typing allows a value of one type to be treated as another, for example treating a string as a
number.[43] 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.

Strong typing prevents these program faults. An attempt to perform an operation on the wrong type
of value raises an error.[43] Strongly-typed languages are often termed type-safe or safe.

An alternative definition for "weakly typed" refers to languages, such as Perl 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 string of letters. Such implicit conversions are often useful, but they can mask
programming errors. Strong and static are now generally considered orthogonal concepts, but usage
in the literature differs. Some use the term strongly typed to mean strongly, statically typed, or, even
more confusingly, to mean simply statically typed. Thus C has been called both strongly typed and
weakly, statically typed.[46][47]

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 datatype in C without using an explicit cast, such as (int) or (char).

Standard library and run-time system

Most programming languages have an associated core library (sometimes known as the "standard
library", especially if it is included as part of the published language standard), 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.

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 that this library be made available in all implementations. Indeed, some languages are
designed so that the meanings of certain syntactic constructs cannot even be described without
referring to the core library. For example, in Java, a string literal is defined as an instance of the
java.lang.String class; similarly, in Smalltalk, an anonymous function expression (a "block")
constructs an instance of the library's BlockContext class. Conversely, Scheme contains multiple
coherent subsets that suffice to construct the rest of the language as library macros, and so the
language designers do not even bother to say which portions of the language must be implemented as
language constructs, and which must be implemented as parts of a library.

Design and implementation

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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.[48][49] 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.[50] 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 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 as filling this role.[51] 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.
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.[52]

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 constructs, and dismissed natural-language programming as
"foolish".[53] Alan Perlis was similarly dismissive of the idea.[54] Hybrid approaches have been taken
in Structured English and SQL.

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.

Specification

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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.

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[55]
and Scheme[56] 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 formal language.
A reference or model implementation, sometimes written in the language being specified (e.g.,
Prolog or ANSI REXX[57]). The syntax and semantics of the language are explicit in the behavior
of the reference implementation.

Implementation

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 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 one line at a time.

Programs that are executed directly on the hardware usually run much faster than those that are
interpreted in software.[58]

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.

Proprietary languages
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 property. Proprietary programming languages are commonly
domain-specific languages or internal scripting languages for a single product; some proprietary
languages are used only internally within a vendor, while others are available to external users.

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,[59] and
Microsoft's C# programming language, which has open implementations of most parts of the system,
also has Common Language Runtime (CLR) as a closed environment.[60]

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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.[61]

Use
Thousands of different programming languages have been created, mainly in the computing field.[62]
Individual software projects commonly use five programming languages or more.[63]

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. On
the other hand, ideas about an algorithm can be communicated to humans without the precision
required for execution by using pseudocode, which interleaves natural language with code written in a
programming language.

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).[64]
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 can run its commands
through an interpreter (such as a Unix shell or other command-line interface), without compiling, it is
called a scripting language.[65]

Measuring language usage

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 kinds of applications. For example, COBOL is still strong in the
corporate data center, often on large mainframes;[66][67] Fortran in scientific and engineering
applications; Ada in aerospace, transportation, military, real-time, and embedded applications; and C
in embedded applications and operating systems. 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[68]

the number of books sold that teach or describe the language[69]
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5/14/23, 3:12 PM Programming language - Wikipedia

estimates of the number of existing lines of code written in the language – which may
underestimate languages not often found in public searches[70]
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, stackify.com reported the ten most
popular programming languages (in descending order by overall popularity): Java, C, C++, Python,
C#, JavaScript, VB .NET, R, PHP, and MATLAB.[71]

Dialects, flavors and implementations

A dialect of a programming language or a data exchange language is a (relatively small) 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 standard, making a new dialect. In other cases, a dialect is created for
use in a domain-specific language, often a subset. In the Lisp world, most languages that use basic S-
expression syntax and Lisp-like semantics are considered Lisp dialects, although they vary wildly, as
do, say, Racket and Clojure. As it is common for one language to have several dialects, it can become
quite difficult for an inexperienced programmer to find the right documentation. The BASIC
programming language has many dialects.

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). Python is an object-oriented scripting language.[72]

In broad strokes, programming languages are classified by programming paradigm and intended
domain of use, with general-purpose programming languages distinguished from domain-specific
programming languages. 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.[73] 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).[74] Some general purpose languages
were designed largely with educational goals.[75]

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

See also
Computer
programming portal

Comparison of programming languages (basic instructions)

Comparison of programming languages
Computer programming
Computer science and Outline of computer science
Domain-specific language
Domain-specific modeling
Educational programming language
Esoteric programming language
Extensible programming
Category:Extensible syntax programming languages
Invariant-based programming
List of BASIC dialects
Lists of programming languages
List of programming language researchers
Programming languages used in most popular websites
Language-oriented programming
Logic programming
Literate programming
Metaprogramming
Ruby (programming language) § Metaprogramming
Modeling language
Programming language theory
Pseudocode
Rebol § Dialects
Reflection
Scientific programming language
Scripting language
Software engineering and List of software engineering topics

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Further reading
Abelson, Harold; Sussman, Gerald Jay Daniel P. Friedman, Mitchell Wand,
(1996). Structure and Interpretation of Christopher T. Haynes: Essentials of
Computer Programs (https://web.archive.org/ Programming Languages, The MIT Press
web/20180309173822/https://mitpress.mit.ed 2001.
u/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-4.html) Maurizio Gabbrielli and Simone Martini:
(2nd ed.). MIT Press. Archived from the "Programming Languages: Principles and
original (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/b Paradigms", Springer, 2010.
ook/book-Z-H-4.html) on 9 March 2018. David Gelernter, Suresh Jagannathan:
Raphael Finkel: Advanced Programming Programming Linguistics, The MIT Press
Language Design (https://web.archive.org/we 1990.
b/20141022141742/http://www.nondot.org/sa Ellis Horowitz (ed.): Programming Languages,
bre/Mirrored/AdvProgLangDesign/), Addison a Grand Tour (3rd ed.), 1987.
Wesley 1995.
Ellis Horowitz: Fundamentals of Programming
Languages, 1989.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language 20/21
5/14/23, 3:12 PM Programming language - Wikipedia

Shriram Krishnamurthi: Programming Michael L. Scott: Programming Language

Languages: Application and Interpretation, Pragmatics, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
online publication (http://www.cs.brown.edu/~ 2005.
sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/). Robert W. Sebesta: Concepts of
Bruce J. MacLennan: Principles of Programming Languages, 9th ed., Addison
Programming Languages: Design, Evaluation, Wesley 2009.
and Implementation, Oxford University Press Franklyn Turbak and David Gifford with Mark
1999. Sheldon: Design Concepts in Programming
John C. Mitchell: Concepts in Programming Languages, The MIT Press 2009.
Languages, Cambridge University Press Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi. Concepts,
2002. Techniques, and Models of Computer
Benjamin C. Pierce: Types and Programming Programming, The MIT Press 2004.
Languages, The MIT Press 2002. David A. Watt. Programming Language
Terrence W. Pratt and Marvin Victor Concepts and Paradigms. Prentice Hall 1990.
Zelkowitz: Programming Languages: Design David A. Watt and Muffy Thomas.
and Implementation (4th ed.), Prentice Hall Programming Language Syntax and
2000. Semantics. Prentice Hall 1991.
Peter H. Salus. Handbook of Programming David A. Watt. Programming Language
Languages (4 vols.). Macmillan 1998. Processors. Prentice Hall 1993.
Ravi Sethi: Programming Languages: David A. Watt. Programming Language
Concepts and Constructs, 2nd ed., Addison- Design Concepts. John Wiley & Sons 2004.
Wesley 1996.

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