Programming language

From Citizendium
Revision as of 22:52, 25 February 2007 by imported>Paul Derry
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Programming Language

A programming language is a way to translate in a reproducible way actions from the programmer into a code the central processing unit CPU can understand and execute. Normally it exists of a series of data definitions combined with logic applied to these data. Generally a computer language reflects the state of development of the hardware and its processing power.

Programming languages can generally be divided into two categories:

Compiled languages must first be translated by a compiler from human readable source code to an intermediate object code. A linker then assembles the object code into executable code that the computer can run.

Interpreted languages rely on a middle-ware application that translates the source into machine code through pre-existing interfaces. For example, an interpreter would read a line such as this: PRINT "Cookies are yummy!" and call the predefined, platform independent function PRINT inside the interpreter itself where the interpreter then executes the platform dependent function call.

compilers
  1. ASSEMBLER
  2. ALGOL
  3. COBOL
  4. FORTRAN
  5. BASIC
  6. MUMPS
  7. PASCAL
  8. C
  9. C++
  10. Visual Basic
  11. Basicscript
  12. NextStep
  13. Java
  14. Javascript
interpretors
  1. BASIC
  2. APL
  3. Basicscript
  4. Javascript
  5. Pike
  6. Ruby
embedded
  1. C
  2. C++
  3. Assembly
IDE
  1. Visual Studio
  2. CodeWarrior
  3. XCode
database programming languages
  1. SQL
  2. PL/SQL
4GL
  1. DML
  2. SQL

all items come with a short description and a typical way to use the language.