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Off-side Rule
A computer programming language is said to adhere to the off-side rule of syntax if blocks in that language are expressed by their indentation. The term was coined by Peter Landin, possibly as a pun on the offside rule in association football. This is contrasted with free-form languages, notably curly-bracket programming languages, where indentation has no computational meaning and indent style is only a matter of coding conventions and formatting. Definition Peter Landin, in his 1966 article " The Next 700 Programming Languages", defined the off-side rule thus: "Any non-whitespace token to the left of the first such token on the previous line is taken to be the start of a new declaration." Code examples The following is an example of indentation blocks in Python. The colons are part of the Python language syntax for readability; they are not needed to implement the off-side rule. In Python, the rule is taken to define the boundaries of statements rather than declarations. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Programming Language
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming language is usually split into the two components of syntax (form) and semantics (meaning), which are usually defined by a formal language. Some languages are defined by a specification document (for example, the C programming language is specified by an ISO Standard) while other languages (such as Perl) have a dominant implementation that is treated as a reference. Some languages have both, with the basic language defined by a standard and extensions taken from the dominant implementation being common. Programming language theory is the subfield of computer science that studies the design, implementation, analysis, characterization, and classification of programming languages. Definitions There are many considerations when defini ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
C (programming Language)
C (''pronounced like the letter c'') is a General-purpose language, general-purpose computer programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie, and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs. It has found lasting use in operating systems, device drivers, protocol stacks, though decreasingly for application software. C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems. A successor to the programming language B (programming language), B, C was originally developed at Bell Labs by Ritchie between 1972 and 1973 to construct utilities running on Unix. It was applied to re-implementing the kernel of the Unix operating system. During the 1980s, C gradually gained popularity. It has become one of the measuring programming language popularity, most widely used programming languages, with C compilers avail ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bourne Shell
The Bourne shell (sh) is a Shell (computing), shell Command-line interface#Command-line interpreter, command-line interpreter for computer operating systems. The Bourne shell was the default Unix shell, shell for Version 7 Unix. Unix-like systems continue to have /bin/sh—which will be the Bourne shell, or a symbolic link or hard link to a compatible shell—even when other shells are used by most users. Developed by Stephen R. Bourne, Stephen Bourne at Bell Labs, it was a replacement for the Thompson shell, whose executable file had the same name—sh. It was released in 1979 in the Version 7 Unix release distributed to colleges and universities. Although it is used as an interactive command interpreter, it was also intended as a scripting language and contains most of the features that are commonly considered to produce structured programs. It gained popularity with the publication of ''The Unix Programming Environment'' by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike—the first commercial ... [...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 lang ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
BASIC
BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963. They wanted to enable students in non-scientific fields to use computers. At the time, nearly all computers required writing custom software, which only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn. In addition to the program language, Kemeny and Kurtz developed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS), which allowed multiple users to edit and run BASIC programs simultaneously on remote terminals. This general model became very popular on minicomputer systems like the PDP-11 and Data General Nova in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hewlett-Packard produced an entire computer line for this method of operation, introducing the HP2000 series in the late 1960s and continuing sales into the 1980s. Many early video games trace their ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reserved Word
In a computer language, a reserved word (also known as a reserved identifier) is a word that cannot be used as an identifier, such as the name of a variable, function, or label – it is "reserved from use". This is a syntactic definition, and a reserved word may have no user-defined meaning. A closely related and often conflated notion is a keyword, which is a word with special meaning in a particular context. This is a semantic definition. By contrast, names in a standard library but not built into the language are not considered reserved words or keywords. The terms "reserved word" and "keyword" are often used interchangeably – one may say that a reserved word is "reserved for use as a keyword" – and formal use varies from language to language; for this article we distinguish as above. In general reserved words and keywords need not coincide, but in most modern languages keywords are a subset of reserved words, as this makes parsing easier, since keywords cannot be confused ... [...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 conversi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ALGOL 60
ALGOL 60 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1960'') is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them, representing a key advance in the rise of structured programming. ALGOL 60 was the first language implementing nested function definitions with lexical scope. It gave rise to many other programming languages, including CPL, Simula, BCPL, B, Pascal, and C. Practically every computer of the era had a systems programming language based on ALGOL 60 concepts. Niklaus Wirth based his own ALGOL W on ALGOL 60 before moving to develop Pascal. Algol-W was intended to be the next generation ALGOL but the ALGOL 68 committee decided on a design that was more complex and advanced rather than a cleaned simplified ALGOL 60. The official ALGOL versions are named after the year they were first published. Algol 68 is substantially different from Algol 60 and was cr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
S-expression
In computer programming, an S-expression (or symbolic expression, abbreviated as sexpr or sexp) is an expression in a like-named notation for nested list (tree-structured) data. S-expressions were invented for and popularized by the programming language Lisp, which uses them for source code as well as data. In the usual parenthesized syntax of Lisp, an S-expression is classically definedJohn McCarthy (1960/2006)Recursive functions of symbolic expressions. Originally published in Communications of the ACM. as # an atom of the form ''x'', or # an expression of the form (''x'' . ''y'') where ''x'' and ''y'' are S-expressions. This definition reflects LISP's representation of a list as a series of "cells", each one an ordered pair. In plain lists, ''y'' points to the next cell (if any), thus forming a list. The recursive clause of the definition means that both this representation and the S-expression notation can represent any binary tree. However, the representation can in princi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lisp (programming Language)
Lisp (historically LISP) is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1960, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in common use, after Fortran. Lisp has changed since its early days, and many dialects have existed over its history. Today, the best-known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Common Lisp, Scheme, Racket and Clojure. Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by (though not originally derived from) the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became a favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, the self-hosting compiler, and the read†... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Goto Fail
In computer programming, unreachable code is part of the source code of a program which can never be executed because there exists no control flow path to the code from the rest of the program. Unreachable code is sometimes also called ''dead code'', although dead code may also refer to code that is executed but has no effect on the output of a program. Unreachable code is generally considered undesirable for several reasons: * It uses memory unnecessarily * It can cause unnecessary use of the CPU's instruction cache ** This can also decrease data locality * Time and effort may be spent testing, maintaining and documenting code which is never used ** Sometimes an automated test is the only thing using the code. However, unreachable code can have some legitimate uses, like providing a library of functions for calling or jumping to manually via a debugger while the program is halted after a breakpoint. This is particularly useful for examining and pretty-printing the internal state ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
