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Io (programming Language)
Io is a pure object-oriented programming language inspired by Smalltalk, Self, Lua, Lisp, Act1, and NewtonScript. Io has a prototype-based object model similar to the ones in Self and NewtonScript, eliminating the distinction between instance and class. Like Smalltalk, everything is an object and it uses dynamic typing. Like Lisp, programs are just data trees. Io uses actors for concurrency. Remarkable features of Io are its minimal size and openness to using external code resources. Io is executed by a small, portable virtual machine. History The language was created by Steve Dekorte in 2002, after trying to help a friend, Dru Nelson, with his language, Cel. He found out that he really didn't know much about how languages worked, and set out to write a tiny language to understand the problems better. Philosophy Io's goal is to explore conceptual unification and dynamic languages, so the tradeoffs tend to favor simplicity and flexibility over performance. Feature ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Object (computer Science)
In computer science, an object can be a variable, a data structure, a function, or a method. As regions of memory, they contain value and are referenced by identifiers. In the object-oriented programming paradigm, ''object'' can be a combination of variables, functions, and data structures; in particular in class-based variations of the paradigm it refers to a particular instance of a class. In the relational model of database management, an object can be a table or column, or an association between data and a database entity (such as relating a person's age to a specific person). Object-based languages An important distinction in programming languages is the difference between an object-oriented language and an object-based language. A language is usually considered object-based if it includes the basic capabilities for an object: identity, properties, and attributes. A language is considered object-oriented if it is object-based and also has the capability of polymorphism, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coroutine
Coroutines are computer program components that generalize subroutines for non-preemptive multitasking, by allowing execution to be suspended and resumed. Coroutines are well-suited for implementing familiar program components such as cooperative tasks, exceptions, event loops, iterators, infinite lists and pipes. Melvin Conway coined the term ''coroutine'' in 1958 when he applied it to the construction of an assembly program. The first published explanation of the coroutine appeared later, in 1963. Comparison with Subroutines Subroutines are special cases of coroutines. When subroutines are invoked, execution begins at the start, and once a subroutine exits, it is finished; an instance of a subroutine only returns once, and does not hold state between invocations. By contrast, coroutines can exit by calling other coroutines, which may later return to the point where they were invoked in the original coroutine; from the coroutine's point of view, it is not exiting but calling a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Concurrency (computer Science)
In computer science, concurrency is the ability of different parts or units of a program, algorithm, or problem to be executed out-of-order or in partial order, without affecting the outcome. This allows for parallel execution of the concurrent units, which can significantly improve overall speed of the execution in multi-processor and multi-core systems. In more technical terms, concurrency refers to the decomposability of a program, algorithm, or problem into order-independent or partially-ordered components or units of computation. According to Rob Pike, concurrency is the composition of independently executing computations, and concurrency is not parallelism: concurrency is about dealing with lots of things at once but parallelism is about doing lots of things at once. Concurrency is about structure, parallelism is about execution, concurrency provides a way to structure a solution to solve a problem that may (but not necessarily) be parallelizable. A number of mathema ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Actor Model
The actor model in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats ''actor'' as the universal primitive of concurrent computation. In response to a message it receives, an actor can: make local decisions, create more actors, send more messages, and determine how to respond to the next message received. Actors may modify their own private state, but can only affect each other indirectly through messaging (removing the need for lock-based synchronization). The actor model originated in 1973. It has been used both as a framework for a theoretical understanding of computation and as the theoretical basis for several practical implementations of concurrent systems. The relationship of the model to other work is discussed in actor model and process calculi. History According to Carl Hewitt, unlike previous models of computation, the actor model was inspired by physics, including general relativity and quantum mechanics. It was also influenced by the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Metaprogramming
Metaprogramming is a programming technique in which computer programs have the ability to treat other programs as their data. It means that a program can be designed to read, generate, analyze or transform other programs, and even modify itself while running. In some cases, this allows programmers to minimize the number of lines of code to express a solution, in turn reducing development time. It also allows programs a greater flexibility to efficiently handle new situations without recompilation. Metaprogramming can be used to move computations from run-time to compile-time, to generate code using compile time computations, and to enable self-modifying code. The ability of a programming language to be its own metalanguage is called reflection. Reflection is a valuable language feature to facilitate metaprogramming. Metaprogramming was popular in the 1970s and 1980s using list processing languages such as LISP. LISP hardware machines were popular in the 1980s and enabled app ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reflection (computer Science)
In computer science, reflective programming or reflection is the ability of a process to examine, introspect, and modify its own structure and behavior. Historical background The earliest computers were programmed in their native assembly languages, which were inherently reflective, as these original architectures could be programmed by defining instructions as data and using self-modifying code. As the bulk of programming moved to higher-level compiled languages such as Algol, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, and C, this reflective ability largely disappeared until new programming languages with reflection built into their type systems appeared. Brian Cantwell Smith's 1982 doctoral dissertation introduced the notion of computational reflection in procedural programming languages and the notion of the meta-circular interpreter as a component of 3-Lisp. Uses Reflection helps programmers make generic software libraries to display data, process different formats of data, perform seri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Type Introspection
In computing, type introspection is the ability of a program to ''examine'' the Data type, type or properties of an Object (computer science), object at Run time (program lifecycle phase), runtime. Some programming languages possess this capability. Introspection should not be confused with reflection (computer programming), reflection, which goes a step further and is the ability for a program to ''manipulate'' the values, metadata, properties, and functions of an object at runtime. Some programming languages also possess that capability (e.g., Java (programming language), Java, Python (programming language), Python, Julia (programming language), Julia, and Go (programming_language), Go). Examples Ruby Type introspection is a core feature of Ruby (programming language), Ruby. In Ruby, the Object class (ancestor of every class) provides and methods for checking the instance's class. The latter returns true when the particular instance the message was sent to is an instance of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Higher-order Functions
In mathematics and computer science, a higher-order function (HOF) is a function that does at least one of the following: * takes one or more functions as arguments (i.e. a procedural parameter, which is a parameter of a procedure that is itself a procedure), * returns a function as its result. All other functions are ''first-order functions''. In mathematics higher-order functions are also termed ''operators'' or '' functionals''. The differential operator in calculus is a common example, since it maps a function to its derivative, also a function. Higher-order functions should not be confused with other uses of the word "functor" throughout mathematics, see Functor (other). In the untyped lambda calculus, all functions are higher-order; in a typed lambda calculus, from which most functional programming languages are derived, higher-order functions that take one function as argument are values with types of the form (\tau_1\to\tau_2)\to\tau_3. General examples * map ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lazy Evaluation
In programming language theory, lazy evaluation, or call-by-need, is an evaluation strategy which delays the evaluation of an expression until its value is needed (non-strict evaluation) and which also avoids repeated evaluations (sharing). The benefits of lazy evaluation include: * The ability to define control flow (structures) as abstractions instead of primitives. * The ability to define potentially infinite data structures. This allows for more straightforward implementation of some algorithms. * The ability to define partially-defined data structures where some elements are errors. This allows for rapid prototyping. Lazy evaluation is often combined with memoization, as described in Jon Bentley's ''Writing Efficient Programs''. After a function's value is computed for that parameter or set of parameters, the result is stored in a lookup table that is indexed by the values of those parameters; the next time the function is called, the table is consulted to determine whe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Homoiconicity
In computer programming, homoiconicity (from the Greek words ''homo-'' meaning "the same" and ''icon'' meaning "representation") is a property of some programming languages. A language is homoiconic if a program written in it can be manipulated as data using the language, and thus the program's internal representation can be inferred just by reading the program itself. This property is often summarized by saying that the language treats "code as data". In a homoiconic language, the primary representation of programs is also a data structure in a primitive type of the language itself. This makes metaprogramming easier than in a language without this property: reflection in the language (examining the program's entities at runtime) depends on a single, homogeneous structure, and it does not have to handle several different structures that would appear in a complex syntax. Homoiconic languages typically include full support of syntactic macros, allowing the programmer to express tr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dynamic Programming Language
In computer science, a dynamic programming language is a class of high-level programming languages, which at runtime execute many common programming behaviours that static programming languages perform during compilation. These behaviors could include an extension of the program, by adding new code, by extending objects and definitions, or by modifying the type system. Although similar behaviors can be emulated in nearly any language, with varying degrees of difficulty, complexity and performance costs, dynamic languages provide direct tools to make use of them. Many of these features were first implemented as native features in the Lisp programming language. Most dynamic languages are also dynamically typed, but not all are. Dynamic languages are frequently (but not always) referred to as scripting languages, although that term in its narrowest sense refers to languages specific to a given run-time environment. Implementation Eval Some dynamic languages offer an ''eval'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
