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High-level Language
In computer science, a high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. In contrast to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language ''elements'', be easier to use, or may automate (or even hide entirely) significant areas of computing systems (e.g. memory management), making the process of developing a program simpler and more understandable than when using a lower-level language. The amount of abstraction provided defines how "high-level" a programming language is. In the 1960s, a high-level programming language using a compiler was commonly called an '' autocode''. Examples of autocodes are COBOL and Fortran. The first high-level programming language designed for computers was Plankalkül, created by Konrad Zuse. However, it was not implemented in his time, and his original contributions were largely isolated from other developments due to World War II, aside from the language's influence on the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (including the design and implementation of hardware and software). Computer science is generally considered an area of academic research and distinct from computer programming. Algorithms and data structures are central to computer science. The theory of computation concerns abstract models of computation and general classes of problems that can be solved using them. The fields of cryptography and computer security involve studying the means for secure communication and for preventing security vulnerabilities. Computer graphics and computational geometry address the generation of images. Programming language theory considers different ways to describe computational processes, and database theory concerns the management of repositories o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ALGOL 58
ALGOL 58, originally named IAL, is one of the family of ALGOL computer programming languages. It was an early compromise design soon superseded by ALGOL 60. According to John Backus The Zurich ACM-GAMM Conference had two principal motives in proposing the IAL: (a) To provide a means of communicating numerical methods and other procedures between people, and (b) To provide a means of realizing a stated process on a variety of machines... ALGOL 58 introduced the fundamental notion of the compound statement, but it was restricted to control flow only, and it was not tied to identifier scope in the way that Algol 60's blocks were. Name Bauer attributes the name to Hermann Bottenbruch, who coined the term ''algorithmic language'' (algorithmische Sprache) in 1957, "at least in Germany". History There were proposals for a universal language by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and also by the German Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik ("Society of App ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modula
The Modula programming language is a descendant of the Pascal language. It was developed in Switzerland, at ETH Zurich, in the mid-1970s by Niklaus Wirth, the same person who designed Pascal. The main innovation of Modula over Pascal is a module system, used for grouping sets of related declarations into program units; hence the name ''Modula''. The language is defined in a report by Wirth called ''Modula. A language for modular multiprogramming'' published 1976. Modula was first implemented by Wirth on a PDP-11. Very soon, other implementations followed, most importantly, the compilers developed for University of York Modula, and one at Philips Laboratories named PL Modula, which generated code for the LSI-11 microprocessor. The development of Modula was discontinued soon after its publication. Wirth then concentrated his efforts on Modula's successor, Modula-2 Modula-2 is a structured, procedural programming language developed between 1977 and 1985/8 by Niklaus Wirth at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pascal (programming Language)
Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, designed by Niklaus Wirth as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. It is named in honour of the French mathematician, philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal. Pascal was developed on the pattern of the ALGOL 60 language. Wirth was involved in the process to improve the language as part of the ALGOL X efforts and proposed a version named ALGOL W. This was not accepted, and the ALGOL X process bogged down. In 1968, Wirth decided to abandon the ALGOL X process and further improve ALGOL W, releasing this as Pascal in 1970. On top of ALGOL's scalars and arrays, Pascal enables defining complex datatypes and building dynamic and recursive data structures such as lists, trees and graphs. Pascal has strong typing on all objects, which means that one type of data cannot be converted to or interpreted as another without explicit conv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Simula
Simula is the name of two simulation programming languages, Simula I and Simula 67, developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard. Syntactically, it is an approximate superset of ALGOL 60, and was also influenced by the design of Simscript. Simula 67 introduced objects, classes, inheritance and subclasses, virtual procedures, coroutines, and discrete event simulation, and featured garbage collection. Other forms of subtyping (besides inheriting subclasses) were introduced in Simula derivatives. Simula is considered the first object-oriented programming language. As its name suggests, the first Simula version by 1962 was designed for doing simulations; Simula 67 though was designed to be a general-purpose programming language and provided the framework for many of the features of object-oriented languages today. Simula has been used in a wide range of applications such as simulating very-large-scale integrati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ALGOL 68
ALGOL 68 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1968'') is an imperative programming language that was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 programming language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and more rigorously defined syntax and semantics. The complexity of the language's definition, which runs to several hundred pages filled with non-standard terminology, made compiler implementation difficult and it was said it had "no implementations and no users". This was only partly true; ALGOL 68 did find use in several niche markets, notably in the United Kingdom where it was popular on International Computers Limited (ICL) machines, and in teaching roles. Outside these fields, use was relatively limited. Nevertheless, the contributions of ALGOL 68 to the field of computer science have been deep, wide-ranging and enduring, although many of these contributions were only publicly identified when they had reappeared in subsequently developed programming ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ALGOL W
ALGOL W is a programming language. It is based on a proposal for ALGOL X by Niklaus Wirth and Tony Hoare as a successor to ALGOL 60. ALGOL W is a relatively simple upgrade of the original ALGOL 60, adding string, bitstring, complex number and reference to record data types and call-by-result passing of parameters, introducing the while statement, replacing switch with the case statement, and generally tightening up the language. Wirth's entry was considered too little of an advance over ALGOL 60, and the more complex entry from Adriaan van Wijngaarden was selected in a highly contentious meeting. Wirth later published his version as ''A contribution to the development of ALGOL''. With a number of small additions, this eventually became ALGOL W. Wirth supervised a high quality implementation for the IBM System/360 at Stanford University that was widely distributed. (Various documents for Stanford's 1972 implementation of ALGOL W; this report includes the ''ALGOL W Language ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Call By Reference
In a programming language, an evaluation strategy is a set of rules for evaluating expressions. The term is often used to refer to the more specific notion of a ''parameter-passing strategy'' that defines the kind of value that is passed to the function for each parameter (the ''binding strategy'') and whether to evaluate the parameters of a function call, and if so in what order (the ''evaluation order''). The notion of reduction strategy is distinct, although some authors conflate the two terms and the definition of each term is not widely agreed upon. To illustrate, executing a function call f(a,b) may first evaluate the arguments a and b, store the results in references or memory locations ref_a and ref_b, then evaluate the function's body with those references passed in. This gives the function the ability to look up the argument values, to modify them via assignment as if they were local variables, and to return values via the references. This is the call-by-reference eval ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semantics (computer Science)
In programming language theory, semantics is the rigorous mathematical study of the meaning of programming languages. Semantics assigns computational meaning to valid strings in a programming language syntax. Semantics describes the processes a computer follows when executing a program in that specific language. This can be shown by describing the relationship between the input and output of a program, or an explanation of how the program will be executed on a certain platform, hence creating a model of computation. History In 1967, Robert W. Floyd publishes the paper ''Assigning meanings to programs''; his chief aim is "a rigorous standard for proofs about computer programs, including proofs of correctness, equivalence, and termination". Floyd further writes: A semantic definition of a programming language, in our approach, is founded on a syntactic definition. It must specify which of the phrases in a syntactically correct program represent commands, and what condi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Call By Name
In a programming language, an evaluation strategy is a set of rules for evaluating expressions. The term is often used to refer to the more specific notion of a ''parameter-passing strategy'' that defines the kind of value that is passed to the function for each parameter (the ''binding strategy'') and whether to evaluate the parameters of a function call, and if so in what order (the ''evaluation order''). The notion of reduction strategy is distinct, although some authors conflate the two terms and the definition of each term is not widely agreed upon. To illustrate, executing a function call f(a,b) may first evaluate the arguments a and b, store the results in references or memory locations ref_a and ref_b, then evaluate the function's body with those references passed in. This gives the function the ability to look up the argument values, to modify them via assignment as if they were local variables, and to return values via the references. This is the call-by-reference eval ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Call By Value
In a programming language, an evaluation strategy is a set of rules for evaluating expressions. The term is often used to refer to the more specific notion of a ''parameter-passing strategy'' that defines the kind of value that is passed to the function for each parameter (the ''binding strategy'') and whether to evaluate the parameters of a function call, and if so in what order (the ''evaluation order''). The notion of reduction strategy is distinct, although some authors conflate the two terms and the definition of each term is not widely agreed upon. To illustrate, executing a function call f(a,b) may first evaluate the arguments a and b, store the results in references or memory locations ref_a and ref_b, then evaluate the function's body with those references passed in. This gives the function the ability to look up the argument values, to modify them via assignment as if they were local variables, and to return values via the references. This is the call-by-reference eval ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lexical Scope
In computer programming, the scope of a name binding (an association of a name to an entity, such as a variable) is the part of a program where the name binding is valid; that is, where the name can be used to refer to the entity. In other parts of the program, the name may refer to a different entity (it may have a different binding), or to nothing at all (it may be unbound). Scope helps prevent name collisions by allowing the same name to refer to different objects – as long as the names have separate scopes. The scope of a name binding is also known as the visibility of an entity, particularly in older or more technical literature—this is from the perspective of the referenced entity, not the referencing name. The term "scope" is also used to refer to the set of ''all'' name bindings that are valid within a part of a program or at a given point in a program, which is more correctly referred to as ''context'' or ''environment''. Strictly speaking and in practice for most ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
