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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] |
Clojure
Clojure (, like ''closure'') is a dynamic and functional dialect of the Lisp programming language on the Java platform. Like other Lisp dialects, Clojure treats code as data and has a Lisp macro system. The current development process is community-driven, overseen by Rich Hickey as its benevolent dictator for life (BDFL). Clojure advocates immutability and immutable data structures and encourages programmers to be explicit about managing identity and its states. This focus on programming with immutable values and explicit progression-of-time constructs is intended to facilitate developing more robust, especially concurrent, programs that are simple and fast. While its type system is entirely dynamic, recent efforts have also sought the implementation of a dependent type system. History and development process Rich Hickey is the creator of the Clojure language. Before Clojure, he developed dotLisp, a similar project based on the .NET platform, and three earlier attempts ... [...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 a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Meta-circular Evaluator
In computing, a meta-circular evaluator (MCE) or meta-circular interpreter (MCI) is an interpreter which defines each feature of the interpreted language using a similar facility of the interpreter's host language. For example, interpreting a lambda application may be implemented using function application. Meta-circular evaluation is most prominent in the context of Lisp. A self-interpreter is a meta-circular interpreter where the interpreted language is nearly identical to the host language; the two terms are often used synonymously. History The dissertation of Corrado Böhm describes the design of a self-hosting compiler. Due to the difficulty of compiling higher-order functions, many languages were instead defined via interpreters, most prominently Lisp. The term itself was coined by John C. Reynolds, and popularized through its use in the book '' Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs''. Self-interpreters A self-interpreter is a meta-circular interpreter ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Douglas McIlroy
Malcolm Douglas McIlroy (born 1932) is a mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2019 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. McIlroy is best known for having originally proposed Unix pipelines and developed several Unix tools, such as spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, and tr. He was also one of the pioneering researchers of macro processors and programming language extensibility. He participated in the design of multiple influential programming languages, particularly PL/I, SNOBOL, ALTRAN, TMG and C++. His seminal work on software componentization and code reuse makes him a pioneer of component-based software engineering and software product line engineering. Biography McIlroy earned his bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from MIT in 1959 for his thesis ''On the Solution of the Differential Equations of Conical Shells'' (advisor Eric Reissner). He taught at MIT ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Programming
Computer programming is the process of performing a particular computation (or more generally, accomplishing a specific computing result), usually by designing and building an executable computer program. Programming involves tasks such as analysis, generating algorithms, profiling algorithms' accuracy and resource consumption, and the implementation of algorithms (usually in a chosen programming language, commonly referred to as coding). The source code of a program is written in one or more languages that are intelligible to programmers, rather than machine code, which is directly executed by the central processing unit. The purpose of programming is to find a sequence of instructions that will automate the performance of a task (which can be as complex as an operating system) on a computer, often for solving a given problem. Proficient programming thus usually requires expertise in several different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, specialized algorit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Implementation Methods
Implementation is the realization of an application, or execution of a plan, idea, model, design, specification, standard, algorithm, or policy. Industry-specific definitions Computer science In computer science, an implementation is a realization of a technical specification or algorithm as a program, software component, or other computer system through computer programming and deployment. Many implementations may exist for a given specification or standard. For example, web browsers contain implementations of World Wide Web Consortium-recommended specifications, and software development tools contain implementations of programming languages. A special case occurs in object-oriented programming, when a concrete class implements an interface; in this case the concrete class is an ''implementation'' of the interface and it includes methods which are ''implementations'' of those methods specified by the interface. Information technology In the information technology during in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Racket (programming Language)
Racket is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language and a multi-platform distribution that includes the Racket language, compiler, large standard library, IDE, development tools, and a set of additional languages including Typed Racket (a sister language of Racket with a static type-checker), Swindle, FrTime, Lazy Racket, R5RS & R6RS Scheme, Scribble, Datalog, Racklog, Algol 60 and several teaching languages. The Racket language is a modern dialect of Lisp and a descendant of Scheme. It is designed as a platform for programming language design and implementation. In addition to the core Racket language, ''Racket'' is also used to refer to the family of programming languages and set of tools supporting development on and with Racket. Racket is also used for scripting, computer science education, and research. The Racket platform provides an implementation of the Racket language (including a runtime system, libraries, and compiler supporting several compilatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scheme (programming Language)
Scheme is a dialect of the Lisp family of programming languages. Scheme was created during the 1970s at the MIT AI Lab and released by its developers, Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman, via a series of memos now known as the Lambda Papers. It was the first dialect of Lisp to choose lexical scope and the first to require implementations to perform tail-call optimization, giving stronger support for functional programming and associated techniques such as recursive algorithms. It was also one of the first programming languages to support first-class continuations. It had a significant influence on the effort that led to the development of Common Lisp.Common LISP: The Language, 2nd Ed., Guy L. Steele Jr. Digital Press; 1981. . "Common Lisp is a new dialect of Lisp, a successor to MacLisp, influenced strongly by ZetaLisp and to some extent by Scheme and InterLisp." The Scheme language is standardized in the official IEEE standard1178-1990 (Reaff 2008) IEEE Standard for t ... [...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 th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Von Neumann Architecture
The von Neumann architecture — also known as the von Neumann model or Princeton architecture — is a computer architecture based on a 1945 description by John von Neumann, and by others, in the '' First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC''. The document describes a design architecture for an electronic digital computer with these components: * A processing unit with both an arithmetic logic unit and processor registers * A control unit that includes an instruction register and a program counter * Memory that stores data and instructions * External mass storage * Input and output mechanisms.. The term "von Neumann architecture" has evolved to refer to any stored-program computer in which an instruction fetch and a data operation cannot occur at the same time (since they share a common bus). This is referred to as the von Neumann bottleneck, which often limits the performance of the corresponding system. The design of a von Neumann architecture machine is simpler than i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eval
In some programming languages, eval , short for the English evaluate, is a function which evaluates a string as though it were an expression in the language, and returns a result; in others, it executes multiple lines of code as though they had been included instead of the line including the eval. The input to eval is not necessarily a string; it may be structured representation of code, such as an abstract syntax tree (like Lisp forms), or of special type such as code (as in Python). The analog for a statement is exec, which executes a string (or code in other format) as if it were a statement; in some languages, such as Python, both are present, while in other languages only one of either eval or exec is. Eval and apply are instances of meta-circular evaluators, interpreters of a language that can be invoked within the language itself. Security risks Using eval with data from an untrusted source may introduce security vulnerabilities. For instance, assuming that the get_da ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abstract Syntax Tree
In computer science, an abstract syntax tree (AST), or just syntax tree, is a tree representation of the abstract syntactic structure of text (often source code) written in a formal language. Each node of the tree denotes a construct occurring in the text. The syntax is "abstract" in the sense that it does not represent every detail appearing in the real syntax, but rather just the structural or content-related details. For instance, grouping parentheses are implicit in the tree structure, so these do not have to be represented as separate nodes. Likewise, a syntactic construct like an if-condition-then statement may be denoted by means of a single node with three branches. This distinguishes abstract syntax trees from concrete syntax trees, traditionally designated parse trees. Parse trees are typically built by a parser during the source code translation and compiling process. Once built, additional information is added to the AST by means of subsequent processing, e.g. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
