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Programming Language Theory
Programming language theory (PLT) is a branch of computer science that deals with the design, implementation, analysis, characterization, and classification of formal languages known as programming languages. Programming language theory is closely related to other fields including mathematics, software engineering, and linguistics. There are a number of academic conferences and journals in the area. History In some ways, the history of programming language theory predates even the development of programming languages themselves. The lambda calculus, developed by Alonzo Church and Stephen Cole Kleene in the 1930s, is considered by some to be the world's first programming language, even though it was intended to ''model'' computation rather than being a means for programmers to ''describe'' algorithms to a computer system. Many modern functional programming languages have been described as providing a "thin veneer" over the lambda calculus, and many are easily described in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lambda Lc
Lambda (}, ''lám(b)da'') is the 11th letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiced alveolar lateral approximant . In the system of Greek numerals, lambda has a value of 30. Lambda is derived from the Phoenician Lamed . Lambda gave rise to the Latin L and the Cyrillic El (Л). The ancient grammarians and dramatists give evidence to the pronunciation as () in Classical Greek times. In Modern Greek, the name of the letter, Λάμδα, is pronounced . In early Greek alphabets, the shape and orientation of lambda varied. Most variants consisted of two straight strokes, one longer than the other, connected at their ends. The angle might be in the upper-left, lower-left ("Western" alphabets) or top ("Eastern" alphabets). Other variants had a vertical line with a horizontal or sloped stroke running to the right. With the general adoption of the Ionic alphabet, Greek settled on an angle at the top; the Romans put the angle at the lower-left. The HTML 4 character entity ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SECD Machine
The SECD machine is a highly influential (''see: '') virtual machine and abstract machine intended as a target for functional programming language compilers. The letters stand for Stack, Environment, Control, Dump—the internal registers of the machine. The registers Stack, Control, and Dump point to (some realisations of) stacks, and Environment points to (some realisation of) an associative array. The machine was the first to be specifically designed to evaluate lambda calculus expressions. It was originally described by Peter J. Landin in "The Mechanical Evaluation of Expressions" in 1964. The description published by Landin was fairly abstract, and left many implementation choices open (like an operational semantics). Lispkit Lisp was an influential compiler based on the SECD machine, and the SECD machine has been used as the target for other systems such as Lisp/370. In 1989 researchers at the University of Calgary worked on a hardware implementation of the machine.A pap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Landin
Peter John Landin (5 June 1930 – 3 June 2009) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the first to realise that the lambda calculus could be used to model a programming language, an insight that is essential to the development of both functional programming and denotational semantics. Academic Landin was born in Sheffield, where he attended King Edward VII School; he graduated from Clare College, Cambridge University. From 1960 to 1964, he was the assistant to Christopher Strachey when the latter was an independent computer consultant in London. Most of his work was published during this period and the brief time he worked for Univac and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, before taking a position at Queen Mary University of London. During the 1970s and 1980s, his efforts went into building the computer science department in Queen Mary College, developing courses, and teaching students, as set forth in the foreword to the textbook '' ... [...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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Object-oriented Programming Language
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of procedures (often known as ''methods''). A common feature of objects is that procedures (or methods) are attached to them and can access and modify the object's data fields. In this brand of OOP, there is usually a special name such as or used to refer to the current object. In OOP, computer programs are designed by making them out of objects that interact with one another. OOP languages are diverse, but the most popular ones are class-based, meaning that objects are instances of classes, which also determine their types. Many of the most widely used programming languages (such as C++, Java, Python, etc.) are multi-paradigm and they support object-oriented programming to a greater or lesser degree, typically in combination with i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kristen Nygaard
Kristen Nygaard (27 August 1926 – 10 August 2002) was a Norwegian computer scientist, programming language pioneer, and politician. Internationally, Nygaard is acknowledged as the co-inventor of object-oriented programming and the programming language Simula with Ole-Johan Dahl in the 1960s. Nygaard and Dahl received the 2001 A. M. Turing Award for their contribution to computer science. Early life and career Nygaard was born in Oslo and received his master's degree in mathematics at the University of Oslo in 1956. His thesis on abstract probability theory was entitled "Theoretical Aspects of Monte Carlo methods". Nygaard worked full-time at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment from 1948 to 1960, in computing and programming (1948–1954) and operational research (1952–1960). From 1957 to 1960, he was head of the first operations research groups in the Norwegian defense establishment. He was cofounder and first chairman of the Norwegian Operational Research Socie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ole-Johan Dahl
Ole-Johan Dahl (12 October 1931 – 29 June 2002) was a Norwegian computer scientist. Dahl was a professor of computer science at the University of Oslo and is considered to be one of the fathers of Simula and object-oriented programming along with Kristen Nygaard. Career Dahl was born in Mandal, Norway. He was the son of Finn Dahl (1898–1962) and Ingrid Othilie Kathinka Pedersen (1905–80). When he was seven, his family moved to Drammen. When he was thirteen, the whole family fled to Sweden during the German occupation of Norway in World War II. After the war's end, Dahl studied numerical mathematics at the University of Oslo. Dahl became a full professor at the University of Oslo in 1968 and was a gifted teacher as well as researcher. Here he worked on ''Hierarchical Program Structures'', probably his most influential publication, which appeared co-authored with C.A.R. Hoare in the influential book ''Structured Programming'' of 1972 by Dahl, Edsger Dijkstra, and Hoar ... [...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] |
Chomsky Hierarchy
In formal language theory, computer science and linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy (also referred to as the Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy) is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars. This hierarchy of grammars was described by Noam Chomsky in 1956. It is also named after Marcel-Paul Schützenberger, who played a crucial role in the development of the theory of formal languages. Formal grammars A formal grammar of this type consists of a finite set of '' production rules'' (''left-hand side'' → ''right-hand side''), where each side consists of a finite sequence of the following symbols: * a finite set of '' nonterminal symbols'' (indicating that some production rule can yet be applied) * a finite set of ''terminal symbols'' (indicating that no production rule can be applied) * a ''start symbol'' (a distinguished nonterminal symbol) A formal grammar provides an axiom schema for (or ''generates'') a ''formal language'', which is a (usually infinite) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and an Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism. Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transform ... [...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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
