Meta-programming
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Meta-programming
Metaprogramming is a computer 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, analyse, 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 more flexibility to efficiently handle new situations with no recompiling. Metaprogramming can be used to move computations from runtime 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 allows reflective programming, and is termed ''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 machine hardware g ...
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Computer Programming
Computer programming or coding is the composition of sequences of instructions, called computer program, programs, that computers can follow to perform tasks. It involves designing and implementing algorithms, step-by-step specifications of procedures, by writing source code, code in one or more programming languages. Programmers typically use high-level programming languages that are more easily intelligible to humans than machine code, which is directly executed by the central processing unit. Proficient programming usually requires expertise in several different subjects, including knowledge of the Domain (software engineering), application domain, details of programming languages and generic code library (computing), libraries, specialized algorithms, and Logic#Formal logic, formal logic. Auxiliary tasks accompanying and related to programming include Requirements analysis, analyzing requirements, Software testing, testing, debugging (investigating and fixing problems), imple ...
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SNOBOL
SNOBOL ("StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language") is a series of programming languages developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&T Bell Laboratories by David J. Farber, Ralph Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky, culminating in SNOBOL4. It was one of a number of text-string-oriented languages developed during the 1950s and 1960s; others included COMIT and TRAC. Despite the similar name, it is entirely unlike COBOL. SNOBOL4 stands apart from most programming languages of its era by having patterns as a first-class data type, a data type whose values can be manipulated in all ways permitted to any other data type in the programming language, and by providing operators for pattern concatenation and alternation. SNOBOL4 patterns are a type of object and admit various manipulations, much like later object-oriented languages such as JavaScript whose patterns are known as regular expressions. In addition SNOBOL4 strings generated during execution can be treated as programs and either inter ...
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Scheme (programming Language)
Scheme is a dialect of the Lisp family of programming languages. Scheme was created during the 1970s at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) 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 offic ...
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Compiler
In computing, a compiler is a computer program that Translator (computing), translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that translate source code from a high-level programming language to a lower level language, low-level programming language (e.g. assembly language, object code, or machine code) to create an executable program.Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, Jeffrey D. Ullman - Second Edition, 2007 There are many different types of compilers which produce output in different useful forms. A ''cross-compiler'' produces code for a different Central processing unit, CPU or operating system than the one on which the cross-compiler itself runs. A ''bootstrap compiler'' is often a temporary compiler, used for compiling a more permanent or better optimised compiler for a language. Related software ...
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Program Transformation
A program transformation is any operation that takes a computer program and generates another program. In many cases the transformed program is required to be semantically equivalent to the original, relative to a particular Formal semantics of programming languages, formal semantics and in fewer cases the transformations result in programs that semantically differ from the original in predictable ways. While the transformations can be performed manually, it is often more practical to use a List of Program Transformation Systems, program transformation system that applies specifications of the required transformations. Program transformations may be specified as automated procedures that modify compiler data structures (e.g. abstract syntax trees) representing the program text, or may be specified more conveniently using patterns or templates representing parameterized source code fragments. A practical requirement for source code transformation systems is that they be able to ef ...
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Ruby (programming Language)
Ruby is a general-purpose programming language. It was designed with an emphasis on programming productivity and simplicity. In Ruby, everything is an object (computer science), object, including primitive data types. It was developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro Matsumoto, Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan. Ruby is interpreted language, interpreted, high-level programming language, high-level, and Dynamic typing, dynamically typed; its interpreter uses garbage collection (computer science), garbage collection and just-in-time compilation. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including procedural programming, procedural, object-oriented programming, object-oriented, and functional programming. According to the creator, Ruby was influenced by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel (programming language), Eiffel, Ada (programming language), Ada, BASIC, and Lisp (programming language), Lisp. History Early concept According to Matsumoto, Ruby was conceived in 1993. In a 1999 post to t ...
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JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have a dedicated JavaScript engine that executes the client code. These engines are also utilized in some servers and a variety of apps. The most popular runtime system for non-browser usage is Node.js. JavaScript is a high-level, often just-in-time–compiled language that conforms to the ECMAScript standard. It has dynamic typing, prototype-based object-orientation, and first-class functions. It is multi-paradigm, supporting event-driven, functional, and imperative programming styles. It has application programming interfaces (APIs) for working with text, dates, regular expressions, standard data structures, and the Document Object Model (DOM). The ECMAScript standard does not include any input/output (I/O), such as netwo ...
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Out-of-order Execution
In computer engineering, out-of-order execution (or more formally dynamic execution) is an instruction scheduling paradigm used in high-performance central processing units to make use of instruction cycles that would otherwise be wasted. In this paradigm, a processor executes instructions in an order governed by the availability of input data and execution units, rather than by their original order in a program. In doing so, the processor can avoid being idle while waiting for the preceding instruction to complete and can, in the meantime, process the next instructions that are able to run immediately and independently. History Out-of-order execution is a restricted form of dataflow architecture, which was a major research area in computer architecture in the 1970s and early 1980s. Early use in supercomputers The first machine to use out-of-order execution was the CDC 6600 (1964), designed by James E. Thornton, which uses a scoreboard to avoid conflicts. It permits ...
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Common Intermediate Language
Common Intermediate Language (CIL), formerly called Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) or Intermediate Language (IL), is the intermediate language binary instruction set defined within the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) specification. CIL instructions are executed by a CIL-compatible runtime environment such as the Common Language Runtime. Languages which target the CLI compile to CIL. CIL is object-oriented, stack-based bytecode. Runtimes typically just-in-time compile CIL instructions into native code. CIL was originally known as Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) during the beta releases of the .NET languages. Due to standardization of C# and the CLI, the bytecode is now officially known as CIL. Windows Defender virus definitions continue to refer to binaries compiled with it as MSIL. General information During compilation of CLI programming languages, the source code is translated into CIL code rather than into platform- or processor-specific object code. ...
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Application Programming Interface
An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build such a connection or interface is called an ''API specification''. A computer system that meets this standard is said to ''implement'' or ''expose'' an API. The term API may refer either to the specification or to the implementation. In contrast to a user interface, which connects a computer to a person, an application programming interface connects computers or pieces of software to each other. It is not intended to be used directly by a person (the end user) other than a computer programmer who is incorporating it into software. An API is often made up of different parts which act as tools or services that are available to the programmer. A program or a programmer that uses one of these parts is said to ''call'' that ...
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Runtime System
In computer programming, a runtime system or runtime environment is a sub-system that exists in the computer where a program is created, as well as in the computers where the program is intended to be run. The name comes from the compile time and runtime division from compiled languages, which similarly distinguishes the computer processes involved in the creation of a program (compilation) and its execution in the target machine (the runtime). Most programming languages have some form of runtime system that provides an environment in which programs run. This environment may address a number of issues including the management of application memory, how the program accesses variables, mechanisms for passing parameters between procedures, interfacing with the operating system (OS), among others. The compiler makes assumptions depending on the specific runtime system to generate correct code. Typically the runtime system will have some responsibility for setting up and managin ...
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Parameter (computer Programming)
In computer programming, a parameter, a.k.a. formal argument, is a variable that represents an argument, a.k.a. actual argument, a.k.a. actual parameter, to a subroutine call.. A function's signature defines its parameters. A call invocation involves evaluating each argument expression of a call and associating the result with the corresponding parameter. For example, consider subroutine def add(x, y): return x + y. Variables x and y are parameters. For call add(2, 3), the expressions 2 and 3 are arguments. For call add(a+1, b+2), the arguments are a+1 and b+2. Parameter passing is defined by a programming language. Evaluation strategy defines the semantics for how parameters can be declared and how arguments are passed to a subroutine. Generally, with call by value, a parameter acts like a new, local variable initialized to the value of the argument. If the argument is a variable, the subroutine cannot modify the argument state because the parameter is a copy. With call by ref ...
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