The Overview of Programming Languages - Essay Example

A Paper on Programming Languages Table of Contents: Introduction History of Programming languages Definition of Programming Language 2 Elements of Programming Language 3 Features of Programming Language 4 Classification of Programming Language 3 End line Bibliography Introduction: This paper attempts, in brief, to overview the topic, Programming Language. Though not in complete detail, this paper presents know-how of programming language with history to start with. History of programming languages: The History of Programming languages can be dated back to 1954. Ever since the idea of computing through electronic devices evolved, for many a people, it was interesting to develop new ways of automating the devices using a new subject called Programming. And to do this it has to be language that bridges man and machine. This communicating language that bridges man and machine is called “Programming language”. Till date, more than 2500 languages were developed. The list1, in the order that was created first, can be started with FORTRAN, Algol, COBOL, LISP, SNOBOL, APL, BASIC, PL/1, ISWIM, MUMPS, LOGO, SMALTALK, B, Forth, PROLOG, Pascal, Icon, C, Pl/M, ML, Modula, Ms-Basic2.0, MOSA, ADA, Rex, C with classes, KRC, Miranda, Objective C, C++, Cedar, SML, Nawk, Object Pascal, SML, Eiffel, ABC, Caml, Haskel, Object oriented Forth, Oberon, Perl, A, Tcl/Tk, ANSI C, Clos, bash, J, Python, Scheme IEEE, Netrexx, Oak, Visual Basic, Sather, CMM, A+, Post Script, Dylan, Ruby, Apple Script, M, Java, Delphi, Self, PHP, VB Script, Java script, Jscript, K, APL, ECMA script, Visual Basic 6.0, C#, VB.Net, ActionScript, Java2…. After the introduction of each language, different versions were released later by their respective manufactured. Though every language is built on the common ground of communicating “Efficiently and Effectively” with the machine, each language has its own merits and demerits. Some were developed with a specific purpose, some with a specific business application, some for scientific purposes, some for publication purposes, some to overcome the demerits of other language, some to efficiently calculate, some to graphically design, some to store large data effectively, some to accept what the man inputs in various ways, and some to simply COMPUTE. Definitions of programming language: “Programming languages are tools used to construct formal descriptions of finite computations (algorithms). Each computation consists of operations that transform a given initial state into some final state. A programming language provides essentially three components for describing such computations: “Data types, objects and values with operations defined upon them. “Rules fixing the chronological relationships among specified operations. “Rules fixing the (static) structure of a program.     “These components together constitute the level of abstraction on which we can formulate algorithms in the language Elements of Programming Language: A programming languages surface form — that is, how programs are represented to a reader---is its syntax. Programming languages vary widely in this surface form. Most programming languages are textual — that is, they consist of sequences of "words" and "punctuation marks", much like written natural languages. However, some exotic programming languages are partly or entirely graphical — such graphical programming languages (or "visual programming languages") use spatial relationships among stylized pictorial representations to communicate their meaning.Regardless of their surface form, all programming languages also specify a semantics, or "meaning", for each syntactic construct in the language. Features of Programming Language: Each programming language can be thought of as a set of formal specifications concerning syntax, vocabulary, and meaning. These specifications usually include: Data Types and Data Structures Instruction and Control Flow Design Philosophy Data types Internally, all data in modern digital computers are stored simply as zeros or ones (binary). The data typically represent information in the real world such as names, bank accounts and measurements and so the low-level binary data are organized by programming languages into these high-level concepts. The particular system by which data are organized in a program is the type system of the programming language; the design and study of type systems is known as type theory. Languages can be classified as statically typed systems, and dynamically typed languages. Statically-typed languages can be further subdivided into languages with manifest types, where each variable and function declaration has its type explicitly declared, and type-inferred languages. It is possible to perform type inference on programs written in a dynamically-typed language, but it is entirely possible to write programs in these languages that make type inference infeasible. Sometimes dynamically-typed languages are called latently typed. Data structures Data structure is a way of storing data in a computer so that it can be used efficiently. Often a carefully chosen data structure will allow a more efficient algorithm to be used. A well-designed data structure allows a variety of critical operations to be performed, using as little resources, both execution time and memory space, as possible. Data structures are implemented using the data types, references and operations on them provided by a programming language. Instruction and control flow: Since programming languages are artificial languages, they require a high degree of discipline to accurately specify which operations are desired. Programming languages are not error tolerant; however, the burden of recognizing and using the special vocabulary is reduced by help messages generated by the programming language implementation. Once data has been specified, the machine must be instructed how to perform operations on the data. Elementary statements may be specified using keywords or may be indicated using some well-defined grammatical structure. Each language takes units of these well-behaved statements and combines them using some ordering system. Depending on the language, differing methods of grouping these elementary statements exist. This allows one to write programs that are able to cover a variety of input, instead of being limited to a small number of cases. Furthermore, beyond the data manipulation instructions, other typical instructions in a language are those used for control flow (branches, definitions by cases, loops, backtracking, and functional composition). Design philosophies: For the above-mentioned purposes, each language has been developed using a special design or philosophy. Some aspect or another is particularly stressed by the way the language uses data structures, or by which its special notation encourages certain ways of solving problems or expressing their structure. Classification of Programming Language: There are a variety of ways to classify programming languages. The distinctions are not clear-cut; a particular language standard may be implemented in multiple classifications. Some classifications are listed below: Procedural languages: Algol, BASIC, C, Fortran, Modula, Pascal Object-oriented languages: Simula, Smalltalk, Self, Eiffel, Java, Objective C, Emerald, Argus, CLOS, Dylan, Self. Functional languages: Lisp, ML, Haskell, APL, Scheme, Erlang, Clean, Miranda PHP is also emerging as a OO language. Logic and constraint languages: Prolog ,Concurrent Prolog, CLP, Jess, OPS-5 Multi-paradigm languages: Ada, C++, Delphi, Modula-3, Oberon, Python Functional/OO hybrids: Nice, OCaml End Line: Weve come a long way from computers programmed with wires and punch cards. Maybe not as far as to computerize our lives, though…, Bibliography: 1. www.levenez.com/lang/ www.oreilly.com/go/languageposter http://people.ku.edu/~nkinners/LangList/Extras/langlist.htm 2. http://www.osdata.com/topic/language/asm/Programming Languages.htm 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language 4. http://www.reference.com/ 5. http://dmoz.org/about.html Read More