Programming paradigm

A programming paradigm is a fundamental style of computer programming. (Compare with a methodology, which is a style of solving specificsoftware engineering problems.) Paradigms differ in the concepts and abstractions used to represent the elements of a program (such as objects, functions, variables, constraints, etc.) and the steps that compose a computation (assignment, evaluation, continuations, data flows, etc.).
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1 Overview 2 Multi-paradigm programming language 3 History 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Overview A programming model is an abstraction of a computer system. For example, the " Neumann model" is a model used in traditional sequential computers. For parallel computing, there are many possible models typically reflecting different ways processors can be interconnected. The most common are based on shared memory, distributed memory with message passing, or a hybrid of the two. A programming language can support multiple paradigms. For example, programs written in C++ or Object Pascal can be purely procedural, or purely object-oriented, or contain elements of both paradigms. Software designers and programmers decide how to use those paradigm elements. In object-oriented programming, programmers can think of a program as a collection of interacting objects, while in functional programming a program can be thought of as a sequence of stateless function evaluations. When programming computers or systems with many processors,process-oriented programming allows programmers to think about applications as sets of concurrent processes acting upon logically shared data structures.

Just as different groups in software engineering advocate different methodologies, different programming languages advocate differentprogramming paradigms. Some languages are designed to support one particular paradigm (Smalltalk supports object-oriented programming,Haskell supports functional programming), while other programming languages support multiple paradigms (such as Object Pascal, C++, Java,C#, Visual Basic, Common Lisp, Scheme, Perl, Python, Ruby, Oz and F Sharp). Many programming paradigms are as well known for what techniques they forbid as for what they enable. For instance, pure functional programming disallows the use of side-effects, while structured programming disallows the use of the go to statement. Partly for this reason, new paradigms are often regarded as doctrinaire or overly rigid by those accustomed to earlier styles. Avoiding certain techniques can make it easier to prove theorems about a program's correctnessor simply to understand its behavior. Multi-paradigm programming language See also: List of multi-paradigm programming languages A multi-paradigm programming language is a programming language that supports more than one programming paradigm. As Leda designerTimothy Budd puts it: "The idea of a multiparadigm language is to provide a framework in which programmers can work in a variety of styles, freely intermixing constructs from different paradigms." The design goal of such languages is to allow programmers to use the best tool for a job, admitting that no one paradigm solves all problems in the easiest or most efficient way. An example is Oz, which has subsets that are logic (Oz descends from logic programming), a functional, an object-oriented, a dataflow concurrent, and other language paradigms. Oz was designed over a ten-year period to combine in a harmonious way concepts that are traditionally associated with different programming paradigms. A programming paradigm provides for the programmer the means and structure for the execution of a program.Initially, computers were hard-wired and then later programmed using binary code that represented control sequences fed to the computer CPU. This was difficult and error-prone. Programs written in binary are said to be written in machine code, which is a very low-level programming paradigm. To make programming easier, assembly languages were developed. These replaced machine code functions with mnemonics and memory addresses with symbolic labels. Assembly language programming is considered a low-level paradigm although it is a 'second generation' paradigm. Even assembly languages of the 1960s actually supported library COPY and quite sophisticated conditional macro generation and pre-processing capabilities. They also supported modular programming features such as CALL (subroutines), external variables and common sections (globals), enabling significant code re-use and isolation from hardware

specifics via use of logical operators as READ/WRITE/GET/PUT. Assembly was, and still is, used for time critical systems and frequently in embedded systems. The next advance was the development of procedural languages. These thirdgeneration languages (the first described as high-level languages) use vocabulary related to the problem being solved. For example,
 

COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) - uses terms like file, move and copy. FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) - using mathematical language terminology, it was developed mainly for scientific and engineering problems. ALGOL (ALGOrithmic Language) - focused on being an appropriate language to define algorithms, while using mathematical language terminology and targeting scientific and engineering problems just like FORTRAN. PL/I (Programming Language One) - a hybrid commercial/scientific general purpose language supporting pointers. BASIC (Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) - was developed to enable more people to write programs.

All these languages follow the procedural paradigm. That is, they describe, step by step, exactly the procedure that should, according to the particular programmer at least, be followed to solve a specific problem. The efficacy and efficiency of any such solution are both therefore entirely subjective and highly dependent on that programmer's experience, inventiveness and ability. Later, object-oriented languages (like Simula, Smalltalk, Eiffel and Java) were created. In these languages, data, and methods of manipulating the data, are kept as a single unit called an object. The only way that a user can access the data is via the object's 'methods' (subroutines). Because of this, the internal workings of an object may be changed without affecting any code that uses the object. There is still some controversy by notable programmers such as Alexander Stepanov, Richard Stallman and others, concerning the efficacy of the paradigm versus the procedural paradigm. The necessity of every object to have associative methods leads some skeptics to associate OOP with software bloat. Polymorphism was developed as one attempt to resolve this dilemma. Since object-oriented programming is considered a paradigm, not a language, it is possible to create even an object-oriented assembler language. High Level Assembly (HLA) is an example of this that fully supports advanced data types and object-oriented assembly language programming - despite its early origins. Thus, differing programming paradigms can be thought of as more like 'motivational memes' of their advocates - rather than necessarily representing

progress from one level to the next. Precise comparisons of the efficacy of competing paradigms are frequently made more difficult because of new and differing terminology applied to similar (but not identical) entities and processes together with numerous implementation distinctions across languages. Within imperative programming, an alternative to the computer-centered hierarchy of structured programming is literate programming, which structures programs instead as a human-centered web, as in a hypertext essay documentation is integral to the program, and the program is structured following the logic of prose exposition, rather than compiler convenience. Independent of the imperative branch based on procedural languages, declarative programming paradigms were developed. In these languages the computer is told what the problem is, not how to solve the problem - the program is structured as a collection of properties to find in the expected result, not as a procedure to follow. Given a database or a set of rules, the computer tries to find a solution matching all the desired properties. The archetypical example of a declarative language is the fourth generation language SQL, as well as the family offunctional languages and logic programming. Functional programming is a subset of declarative programming. Programs written using this paradigm use functions, blocks of code intended to behave like mathematical functions. Functional languages discourage changes in the value of variables through assignment, making a great deal of use of recursion instead. The logic programming paradigm views computation as automated reasoning over a corpus of knowledge. Facts about the problem domain are expressed as logic formulae, and programs are executed by applying inference rules over them until an answer to the problem is found, or the collection of formulae is proved inconsistent.

Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely. The earliest programming languages predate the invention of the computer, and were used to direct the behavior of machines such as Jacquard looms and player pianos. Thousands of different programming languages have been created, mainly in the computer field, with many more being created every year. Most programming languages describe computation in an imperative style, i.e., as a sequence of commands, although some languages, such as those that support functional programming or logic programming, use alternative forms of description. A programming language is usually split into the two components of syntax (form) and semantics (meaning). Some languages are defined by a specification document (for example, the programming language is specified by an Standard), while other languages, such as Perl, have a dominant implementation that is used as a reference.

Definitions

A programming language is a notation for writing programs, which are specifications of a computation or algorithm. Some, but not all, authors restrict the term "programming language" to those languages that can express all possible algorithms. Traits often considered important for what constitutes a programming language include:  Function and target: A computer programming language is a languag used to write computer programs, which involve a computer performing some kind of computation oralgorithm and possibly control external devices such as printers, disk drives, robots, and so on. For example PostScript programs are frequently created by another program to control a computer printer or display. More generally, a programming language may describe computation on some, possibly abstract, machine. It is generally accepted that a complete specification for a programming language includes a description, possibly idealized, of a machine or processor for that language.[6] In most practical contexts, a programming language involves a computer; consequently programming

languages are usually defined and studied this way.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.  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; this principle is sometimes formulated as recommendation to the programmer to make proper use of such abstractions.  Expressive power: The theory of computation classifies languages by the computations they are capable of expressing. All Turing complete languages can implement the same set ofalgorithms. ANSI/ISO SQL and Charity are examples of languages that are not Turing complete, yet often called programming languages. Markup languages like XML, HTML or troff, which define structured data, are not generally considered programming languages.Programming languages may, however, share the syntax with markup languages if a computational semantics is defined. XSLT, for example, is a Turing complete XML dialect. Moreover, LaTeX, which is mostly used for structuring documents, also contains a Turing complete subset. The term computer language is sometimes used interchangeably with programming language.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.In this vein, 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. 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.r 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.

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.

A programming language is a notation for writing programs, which are specifications of a computation or algorithm.Some, but not all, authors restrict the term "programming language" to those languages that can express all possible algorithms. Traits often considered important for what constitutes a programming language include:  Function and target: A computer programming language is a languager used to write computer programs, which involve a computer performing some kind of computation algorithm and possibly control external devices such as printers, disk drives, robots, and so on. For example PostrScript programs are frequently created by another program to control a computer printer or display. More generally, a programming language may describe computation on some, possibly abstract, machine. It is generally accepted that a complete specification for a programming language includes a description, possibly idealized, of a machine or processor for that languager In most practical contexts, a programming language involves a computer; consequently programming languages are usually defined and studied this way. 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.  Abstractions: Programming languages usually contain abstracrtions 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; this principle is sometimes formulated as recommendation to the programmer to make proper use of such abstractions.  Expressive power: The theorry of computation classifies languages by the computations they are capable of expressing. All Turing complete languages can implement the same set ofalgorithms. ANSI/ISO SQL and Charity are examples of languages that are not Turing complete, yet often called programming languages. Markup languages like RML, HTML or troff, which define structurred data, are not generally considered programming languages. Programming languages may, however, share the syntax with markup languages if a computational semantics is defined. XSLT, for example, is a Turing complete XML dialect. Moreover, LaTeX, which is mostly used for structuring documents, also contains a Turing complete subset. The term computer language is sometimes used interchangeably with programming language. 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. In this vein, 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
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emphasize that they are not meant to be used for programming. 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. 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.

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, there are some programming languages which are more grraphical 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 hardcoded in a reference implemerntation). Since most languages are textual, this article discusses textual syntax. Programming language syntax is usually defined using a combination of regular expressions (for lexicral structure) and BackusNaur 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* ')'

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 sequences in this grammar: '12345', '()', '(a b c232 (1))' 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 undefinedr 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 compilation, as the variable "p" would not be defined. But 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. 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 generally blur the distinction between parsing and execution. 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.

Semantics
Further information: Semantics#Computer_science The term semantics refers to the meaning of languages, as opposed to their form (syntax).

Static semantics[
The 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 distinct. 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 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
Main article: Semantics of programming languages 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 allow 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
Main articles: Type systrem and Type safety 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 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, with the implication that it is not applicable to other types. For example, the data represented by "this text between the quotes" is a string. In most programming languages, dividing a number by a string has no meaning. Most modern programming languages will therefore reject any program attempting to perform such an operation. In some languages, the meaningless operation will be detected when the program is compiled ("static" type checking), and rejected by the compiler, while in others, it will be detected when the program is run ("dynamic" type checking), resulting in a runtime exception. A special case of typed languages are the single-type languages. These are often scripting or markup languages, such as REXX or SGML, and have only one data typemost 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, which are generally considered to be sequences of bits of various lengths.[29] High-level languages which are untyped include BCPL and some varieties of Forth. In practice, while few languages are considered typed from the point of view of type theory (verifying or rejecting all operations), most modern languages offer a degree of typing. Many production languages provide means to bypass or subvert the type system.

Static versus 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. Statically typed languages can be either manirestly typed or type-inferred. In the first case, the programmer must explicitly write types at certain textual positions (for example, at variabledeclarations). In the second case, the compiler infers the types of expressions and declarations based on context. Most mainstream statically typed languages, such as andJava, are manifestly typed. Complete type inference has traditionally been associated with less mainstream languages, such as Haskell and ML. However, many manifestly typed languages support partial type inference; for example, Java and both infer types in certain limited cases. Dynamic typing, also called latent typing, determines the type-safety of operations at runtime; in other words, types are associated with runtime values rather than textual expressionsAs 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 automatically detected until a piece of code is actually executed, potentially making debugging more difficult. Ruby, Lisp, JavaScript, and Python are dynamically typed.

Weak and strong typing

Weak tyrping allows a value of one type to be treated as another, for example treating a string as a number. 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 the above. An attempt to perform an operation on the wrong type of value raises an error. Strongly typed languages are often termed type-safe or safe. An alternative definition for "weakly typed" refers to languages, such as Perrl 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 typedto mean strongly, statically typed, or, even more confusingly, to mean simply statically typed. Thus has been called both strongly typed and weakly, statically typed.

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. A language's core library is often treated as part of the language by its users, although the designers may have treated it as a separate entity. Many language specifications define a core that must be made available in all implementations, and in the case of standardized languages this core library may be required. The line between a language and its core library therefore differs from language to language. 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 anonrymous 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

Programming languages share properties with natural languages related to their purpose as vehicles for communication, having a syntactic form separate from its semantics, and showinglanguage families of related languages branching one from another. 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. 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. 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.

Finally, 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. Natural language processors have 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".Alan Prerlis was similarly dismissive of the idea. 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 languagespecification and implementation.

Specification
Main article: Programming language specification The specification of a programming language is intended to provide a definition that the language users and the implementors can use to determine whether the behavior of a prorgrarm is correct, given its sourcer code. 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,r), or a formal semantics (e.g., as in and Scheme specifications).  A description of the behavior of a translator for the language (e.g., the and Fortran specifications). The syntax and semantics of the language have to be inferred from this description, which may be written in natural or a formal language.

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

Implementation
Main article: Programming language implementation An implementation of a programming language provides a way to execute that program 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 compile and then execute the source a line at a time. Programs that are executed directly on the hardware usually run several orders of magnitude faster than those that are interpreted in software. 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.

Usage
Thousands of different programming languages have been created, mainly in the computing field.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. Aprogrammer 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). 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 r in an interractive session of an interrpreter. In this case the "commands" are simply programs, whose execution is chrained together. When a language is used to give commands to a software application (such as a shell) it is called a scripting language.

Measuring language usage

Main article: Measuring programming language popularity It is difficult to determine which programming languages are most widely used, and what usage means varies by context. One language may occupy the greater number of programmer hours, a different one have more lines of code, and a third utilize 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 mainfrrmres; FORTRAN in scientific and engineering applications; and 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 the number of books sold that teach or describe the language estimates of the number of existing lines of code written in the languagewhich may underestimate languages not often found in public searche  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, langpop.com claims that in 2008 the 10 most cited programming languages are (in alphabetical orderr, and SQL.

Taxonomies
For more details on this topic, see Categorical list of programming languages. 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. In broad strokes, programming languages divide into programming paradigms and a classification by intended domain of use. 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.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). Some general purpose languages were designed largely with educational goals. A programming language may also be classified by factors unrelated to programming paradigm. For instance, most programming languages use English language keywords, while a minority do not. Other languages may be classified as being esoteric or not.

Interpreter and Compiler

Interpreter An Interpreter is a program that implements or simulates a virtual machine using the base set of instructions of a programming language as its machine language. You can also think of an Interpreter as a program that implements a library containing the implementation of the basic instruction set of a programming language in machine language. An Interpreter reads the statements of a program, analyzes them and then executes them on the virtual machine by calling the corresponding instructions of the library. Interactive interpreter session During an interactive interpreter session the statements are not only read, analyzed and executed but the result of the evaluation of an expression is also printed. This is also called a READ - EVAL - PRINT loop.

Important Pay attention, the READ - EVAL - PRINT loop is only entered in an interactive session. If you ask the interpreter to execute code in a file, results of expression evaluations are not printed. You have to do this by yourself. Compiler A Compiler is a program that translates code of a programming language in machine code, also called object code. The object code can be executed directly on the machine where it was compiled.

Figure 5.1 compares the usage of interpreters and compilers. Figure 5.1. Comparison of compiled and interpreted code

So using a compiler separates translation and execution of a program. In contrast of an interpreted program the source code is translated only once. The object code is machine-dependent meaning that the compiled program can only be executed on a machine for which it has been compiled, whereas an interpreted program is not machine-dependentbecause the machine-dependent part is in the interpreter itself. Figure 5.2 illustrates another concept of program execution that tries to combine the advantage of more effective execution of compiled code and the advantage of machine-independence of interpreted code. This concept is used by the JAVA programming language for example and in a more subtle way by Python.

Figure 5.2. Execution of byte compiled code

In this case the source code is translated by a compiler in a sort of object code, also called byte code that is then executed by an interpreter implementing a virtual machine using this byte code. The execution of the byte code is faster than the interpretation of the source code, because the major part of the analysis and verification of the source code is done during the compilation step. But the byte codeis still machine-independent because the machine-dependent part is implemented in the virtual machine. We will see later how this concept is used in P.

Structured analysis
Structured Analysis (SA) in software engineering and its allied technique, Structured Design (SD), are methods for analyzing and converting business requirerments into specifications and ultimately, computrer programs, hardware configurations and related manual procedures. Structured analysis and design techniques are fundamental tools of systems analysis, and developed from classical systems analysis of the 1960s and 1970s.

Objectives of Structured Analysis

Structured Analysis became popular in the 1980s and is still used by many. The analysis consists of interpreting the system concept (or real world) into data and control terminology, that is into data flow diagrams. The flow of data and control from bubble to data store to bubble can be very hard to track and the number of bubbles can get to be extremely large. One approach is to first define events from the outside world that require the system to react, then assign a bubble to that event, bubbles that need to

interact are then connected until the system is defined. This can be rather overwhelming and so the bubbles are usually grouped into higher level bubbles. Data Dictionaries are needed to describe the data and command flows and a process specification is needed to capture the transaction/transformation information.
[3]

SA and SD were accompanied by notational methods including structure charts, data flow diagrams and data model diagrams, of which there were many variations, including those developed by Tom DeMarco, Ken Orr, Larry Constantine, Vaughn Frick, Ed Yourdon, Steven Ward, Peter Chen, and others. These techniques were combined in various published System Development Methodologies, including Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method, Profitable Information by Design (PRIDE), Nastec Structured Analysis & Design, SDM/70 and the Spectrum Structured system development methodology. [edit]History Structured analysis is part of a series of structured methods, that "represent a collection of analysis, design, and programming techniques that were developed in response to the problems facing the software world from the 1960s to the 1980s. In this timeframe most commercial programming was done in Cobol and Fortran, then C and BASIC. There was little guidance on good design and programming techniques, and there were no standard techniques for documenting requirements and designs. Systems where getting larger and more complex, and the information system development became harder and harder to do so".[4] As a way to help manage large and complex software. Since the end 1960 multiple Structured Methods emerged:[4]      Structured programming in circa 1967 with Edsger Dijkstra - "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" Niklaus Wirth Stepwise design in 1971 NassiShneiderman diagram in 1972 Warnier/Orr diagram in 1974 - "Logical Construction of Programs" HIPO in 1974 - IBM Hierarchy input-process-output (though this should really be output-inputprocess)    Structured Design around 1975 with Larry Constantine, Ed Yourdon and Wayne Stevens. Jackson Structured Programming in circa 1975 developed by Michael A. Jackson Structured Analysis in circa 1978 with Tom DeMarco, Yourdon, Gane & Sarson, McMenamin & Palmer.  Structured Analysis and Design Technique (SADT) developed by Douglas T. Ross

  

Yourdon Structured Method developed by Edward Yourdon. Structured Analysis and System Specification published in 1979 by Tom DeMarco. Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method (SSADM) first presented in 1983 developed by the UK Office of Government Commerce. IDEF0 based on SADT, developed by Douglas T. Ross in 1985.[5] Information Engineering in circa 1990 with Finkelstein and popularised by James Martin.

 

According to Hay (1999) "information engineering was a logical extension of the structured techniques that were developed during the 1970s. Structured programming led to structured design, which in turn led to structured systems analysis. These techniques were characterized by their use of diagrams: structure charts for structured design, and data flow diagrams for structured analysis, both to aid in communication between users and developers, and to improve the analysts and the designers discipline. During the 1980s, tools began to appear which both automated the drawing of the diagrams, and kept track of the things drawn in a data dictionary".[6] After the example of computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM), the use of these tools was named Computer-aided software engineering (CASE). [edit]Structured [edit]Single

analysis topics

abstraction mechanism

Image:Structured Analysis example.[7]

Structured analysis typically creates a hierarchy employing a single abstraction mechanism. The structured analysis method can employ IDEF (see figure), is process driven, and starts with a purpose and a viewpoint. This method identifies the overall function and iteratively divides functions into smaller functions, preserving inputs, outputs, controls, and mechanisms necessary to optimize processes. Also

known as a functional decomposition approach, it focuses on cohesion within functions and coupling between functions leading to structured data.
[7]

The functional decomposition of the structured method describes the process without delineating system behavior and dictates system structure in the form of required functions. The method identifies inputs and outputs as related to the activities. One reason for the popularity of structured analysis is its intuitive ability to communicate high-level processes and concepts, whether single system or enterprise levels. Discovering how objects might support functions for commercially prevalent object-oriented development is unclear. In contrast to IDEF, the UML is interface driven with multiple abstraction mechanisms useful in describing service-oriented architectures (SOAs). [edit]Approach Structured Analysis views a system from the perspective of the data flowing through it. The function of the system is described by processes that transform the data flows. Structured analysis takes advantage of information hiding through successive decomposition (or top down) analysis. This allows attention to be focused on pertinent details and avoids confusion from looking at irrelevant details. As the level of detail increases, the breadth of information is reduced. The result of structured analysis is a set of related graphical diagrams, process descriptions, and data definitions. They describe the transformations that need to take place and the data required to meet a system's functional requirements.[8]
[7]

The structured analyse approach develops perspectives on both process objects and data objects.[8]

De Marco's approach[9] consists of the following objects (see figure)[8]:     Context diagram dataflow diagram, process specifications, and a data dictionary,

Hereby the Data flow diagrams (DFDs) are directed graphs. The arcs represent data, and the nodes (circles or bubbles) represent processes that transform the data. A process can be further decomposed to a more detailed DFD which shows the subprocesses and data flows within it. The subprocesses can in turn be decomposed further with another set of DFDs until their functions can be easily understood. Functional primitives are processes which do not need to be decomposed further. Functional primitives are described by a process specification (or mini-spec). The process specification can consist of pseudocode, flowcharts, or structured English. The DFDs model the structure of the system as a network of interconnected processes composed of functional primitives. The data dictionary is a set of entries (definitions) of data flows, data elements, files. and data bases. The data dictionary enmes are partitioned in a topdown manner. They can be referenced in other data dictionary entries and in data flow diagrams.
[8]

[edit]Context

diagram

Example of a System context diagram. [10]

Context diagrams are diagrams that represent the actors outside a system that could interact with that system.[11] This diagram is the highest level view of a system, similar to Block Diagram, showing a, possibly software-based, system as a whole and its inputs and outputs from/to external factors. This type of diagram according to Kossiakoff (2003) usually "pictures the system at the center, with no details of its interior structure, surrounded by all its interacting systems, environment and activities. The objective of a system context diagram is to focus attention on external factors and events that should be considered in developing a complete set of system requirements and constraints".[11] System context diagram are related to Data Flow Diagram, and show the interactions between a system and other actors with which the system is designed to face. System context diagrams can be helpful in understanding the context in which the system will be part of software engineering.

[edit]Data

dictionary

Entity relationship diagram, essential for the design of database tables, extracts, and metadata. [12]

A data dictionary or database dictionary is a file that defines the basic organization of a database.[12] A database dictionary contains a list of all files in the database, the number of records in each file, and the names and types of each data field. Mostdatabase management systems keep the data dictionary hidden from users to prevent them from accidentally destroying its contents. Data dictionaries do not contain any actual data from the database, only bookkeeping information for managing it. Without a data dictionary, however, a database management system cannot access data from the database.[12] Database users and application developers can benefit from an authoritative data dictionary document that catalogs the organization, contents, and conventions of one or more databases.[13] This typically includes the names and descriptions of various tables and fields in each database, plus additional details, like the type and length of each data element. There is no universal standard as to the level of detail in such a document, but it is primarily a distillation of metadata about database structure, not the data itself. A data dictionary document also may include further information describing how data elements are encoded. One of the advantages of well-designed data dictionary documentation is that it helps to establish consistency throughout a complex database, or across a large collection of federated databases.[14]

[edit]Data

Flow Diagrams

Data Flow Diagram example.[15]

A Data Flow Diagram (DFD) is a graphical representation of the "flow" of data through an information system. It differs from the system flowchart as it shows the flow of data through processes instead of hardware. Data flow diagrams were invented by Larry Constantine, developer of structured design, based on Martin and Estrin's "data flow graph" model of computation.[16] It is common practice to draw a System Context Diagram first which shows the interaction between the system and outside entities. The DFD is designed to show how a system is divided into smaller portions and to highlight the flow of data between those parts. This context-level Data flow diagram is then "exploded" to show more detail of the system being modeled. Data flow diagrams (DFDs) are one of the three essential perspectives of Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method(SSADM). The sponsor of a project and the end users will need to be briefed and consulted throughout all stages of a system's evolution. With a dataflow diagram, users are able to visualize how the system will operate, what the system will accomplish, and how the system will be implemented. The old system's dataflow diagrams can be drawn up and compared with the new system's dataflow diagrams to draw comparisons to implement a more efficient system. Dataflow diagrams can be used to provide the end user with a physical idea of where the data they input ultimately has an effect upon the structure of the whole system from order to dispatch to recook. How any system is developed can be determined through a dataflow diagram.

[edit]Structure

Chart

A Configuration System Structure Chart.

A Structure Chart (SC) is a chart, that shows the breakdown of the configuration system to the lowest manageable levels. This chart is used in structured programming to arrange the program modules in a tree structure. Each module is represented by a box which contains the name of the modules. The tree structure visualizes the relationships between the modules. In structured analysis structure charts are used to specify the high-level design, or architecture, of a computer program. As a design tool, they aid the programmer in dividing and conquering a large software problem, that is, recursively breaking a problem down into parts that are small enough to be understood by a human brain. The process is called top-down dresign, orfunctional decomposition. Programmers use a structure chart to build a program in a manner similar to how an architect uses a blueprint to build a house. In the design stage, the chart is drawn and used as a way for the client and the various software designers to communicate. During the actual building of the program (implementation), the chart is continually referred to as the master-plan.

Structured Design
Structured Design (SD) is concerned with the development of modules and the synthesis of these modules in a so called "module hierarchy" In order to design optimal module structure and interfaces two principles are crucial:  Cohesion which is "concerned with the grouping of functionally related processes into a particular module".  Coupling relates to "the flow of information, or parameters, passed between modules. Optimal coupling reduces the interfaces of modules, and the resulting complexity of the software"