Metaprogramming
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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 ...
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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 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 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 effectively process programs written in a programming language. This usually require ...
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C Sharp (programming Language)
C# (pronounced ) is a general-purpose, high-level multi-paradigm programming language. C# encompasses static typing, strong typing, lexically scoped, imperative, declarative, functional, generic, object-oriented (class-based), and component-oriented programming disciplines. The C# programming language was designed by Anders Hejlsberg from Microsoft in 2000 and was later approved as an international standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) in 2002 and ISO/IEC (ISO/IEC 23270) in 2003. Microsoft introduced C# along with .NET Framework and Visual Studio, both of which were closed-source. At the time, Microsoft had no open-source products. Four years later, in 2004, a free and open-source project called Mono began, providing a cross-platform compiler and runtime environment for the C# programming language. A decade later, Microsoft released Visual Studio Code (code editor), Roslyn (compiler), and the unified .NET platform (software framework), all of which support C# and are free, open ...
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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 ...
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Compile-time Function Execution
In computing, compile-time function execution (or compile time function evaluation, or general constant expressions) is the ability of a compiler, that would normally compile a function to machine code and execute it at run time, to execute the function at compile time. This is possible if the arguments to the function are known at compile time, and the function does not make any reference to or attempt to modify any global state (i.e. it is a pure function). If the value of only some of the arguments are known, the compiler may still be able to perform some level of compile-time function execution ( partial evaluation), possibly producing more optimized code than if no arguments were known. Examples Lisp The Lisp macro system is an early example of the use of compile-time evaluation of user-defined functions in the same language. C++ The Metacode extension to C++ (Vandevoorde 2003) was an early experimental system to allow compile-time function evaluation (CTFE) and code inject ...
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Generative Programming
In computer science, the term automatic programming identifies a type of computer programming in which some mechanism generates a computer program to allow human programmers to write the code at a higher abstraction level. There has been little agreement on the precise definition of automatic programming, mostly because its meaning has changed over time. David Parnas, tracing the history of "automatic programming" in published research, noted that in the 1940s it described automation of the manual process of punching paper tape. Later it referred to translation of high-level programming languages like Fortran and ALGOL. In fact, one of the earliest programs identifiable as a compiler was called Autocode. Parnas concluded that "automatic programming has always been a euphemism for programming in a higher-level language than was then available to the programmer." Program synthesis is one type of automatic programming where a procedure is created from scratch, based on mathematica ...
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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†...
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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 ...
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Ruby (programming Language)
Ruby is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language which supports multiple programming paradigms. It was designed with an emphasis on programming productivity and simplicity. In Ruby, everything is an object, including primitive data types. It was developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan. Ruby is dynamically typed and uses garbage collection and just-in-time compilation. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming. According to the creator, Ruby was influenced by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, BASIC, Java and Lisp. History Early concept Matsumoto has said that Ruby was conceived in 1993. In a 1999 post to the ''ruby-talk'' mailing list, he describes some of his early ideas about the language: Matsumoto describes the design of Ruby as being like a simple Lisp language at its core, with an object system like that of Smalltalk, blocks inspired by higher-o ...
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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 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 the S ...
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Pascal Script
Pascal Script is a scripting language based on the programming language Pascal that facilitates automated runtime control over scriptable applications and server software. It is implemented by a free scripting engine that includes a compiler and an interpreter for byte code. Pascal Script supports the majority of Object Pascal constructs, making it partly compatible to Delphi, Free Pascal and GNU Pascal. Initially developed by Carlo Kok as CajScript and renamed to Innerfuse Pascal Script with version 2.23, the software was taken over by RemObjects, renamed again to RemObjects Pascal Script and offered as open source software for the Delphi IDE. Beginning with version 2.07 CajScript has been ported to Free Pascal. Since 2017 Pascal Script is included as a standard component in the Lazarus IDE. Software using Pascal Script Pascal Script can be used by installer scripts for Inno Setup, an open source setup engine. Using Pascal Script may provide additional flexibility during inst ...
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RemObjects
RemObjects Software is an American software company founded in 2002 by Alessandro Federici and Marc Hoffman. It develops and offers tools and libraries for software developers on a variety of development platforms, including Embarcadero Delphi, Microsoft .NET, Mono, and Apple's Xcode. History RemObjects Software was founded in the summer of 2002. Its first product was RemObjects SDK 1.0 for Delphi, the company's remoting solution which is now in its 6th version. In late 2003 RemObjects expanded its product portfolio to add Data Abstract for Delphi, a multi-tier database framework built on top of the SDK. In 2004, Carlo Kok, who would eventually become Chief Compiler Architect for Oxygene, joined the company, adding the open source Pascal Script library for Delphi to the company's portfolio. Initial development began on Oxygene (which was then named ''Chrome'') based on Carlo's experience from writing the widely used Pascal Script scripting engine. Towards the end of 2004, RemObj ...
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NET Framework
The .NET Framework (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It was the predominant implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) until being superseded by the cross-platform .NET project. It includes a large class library called Framework Class Library (FCL) and provides language interoperability (each language can use code written in other languages) across several programming languages. Programs written for .NET Framework execute in a software environment (in contrast to a computer hardware, hardware environment) named the Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR is an process virtual machine, application virtual machine that provides services such as security, memory management, and exception handling. As such, computer code written using .NET Framework is called "managed code". FCL and CLR together constitute the .NET Framework. FCL provides the user interface, data access, d ...
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