Programming 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.

C (, as in the general-purpose, procedural computer programming language supporting structured programming, lexical variable scope, and recursion, while a static type system prevents unintended operations.

The description of a programming language is usually split into the two components of syntax (form) and semantics (meaning).

This applies both to programming languages, where the document represents source code, and to markup languages, where the document represents data.

A programming language is a formal language, which comprises a set of instructions that produce various kinds of output.

In computer science, formal languages are used among others as the basis for defining the grammar of programming languages and formalized versions of subsets of natural languages in which the words of the language represent concepts that are associated with particular meanings or semantics.

A programming language is a notation for writing programs, which are specifications of a computation or algorithm.

A computer program is usually written by a computer programmer in a programming language.

XSLT, for example, is a Turing complete language entirely using XML syntax.

In computability theory, a system of data-manipulation rules (such as a computer's instruction set, a programming language, or a cellular automaton) is said to be Turing complete or computationally universal if it can be used to simulate any Turing machine.

Markup languages like XML, HTML, or troff, which define structured data, are not usually considered programming languages.

A data model can sometimes be referred to as a data structure, especially in the context of programming languages.

A programming language is a notation for writing programs, which are specifications of a computation or algorithm. Programming languages are used in computer programming to implement algorithms.

Algorithms can be expressed in many kinds of notation, including natural languages, pseudocode, flowcharts, drakon-charts, programming languages or control tables (processed by interpreters).

For example, the semantics may define the strategy by which expressions are evaluated to values, or the manner in which control structures conditionally execute statements.

Within an imperative programming language, a control flow statement is a statement, the execution of which results in a choice being made as to which of two or more paths to follow.

One common trend in the development of programming languages has been to add more ability to solve problems using a higher level of abstraction.

Abstractions may also refer to real-world objects and systems, rules of computational systems or rules of programming languages that carry or utilize features of abstraction itself, such as:

An early high-level programming language to be designed for a computer was Plankalkül, developed for the German Z3 by Konrad Zuse between 1943 and 1945.

Plankalkül is a programming language designed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945.

Charity is an experimental purely functional programming language, developed at the University of Calgary under the supervision of Robin Cockett.

Some formal design methods and programming languages emphasize data structures, rather than algorithms, as the key organizing factor in software design.

As a programming language, it used a compiler to automatically convert the language into machine code.

A compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the source language) into another language (the target language).

Markup languages like XML, HTML, or troff, which define structured data, are not usually considered programming languages.

It was rewritten as rf for the PDP-7, and at the same time (1969), Doug McIlroy rewrote an extended and simplified version of roff in the BCPL programming language.

The first high-level programming languages, or third-generation programming languages (3GL), were written in the 1950s.

A third-generation programming language (3GL) is a generational way to categorize high-level computer programming languages.

A contemporary but separate thread of development, Atlas Autocode was developed for the University of Manchester Atlas 1 machine.

Atlas Autocode (AA) was a programming language developed around 1965 at Manchester University.

They are distinguished from constructed and formal languages such as those used to program computers or to study logic.

As a programming language, it used a compiler to automatically convert the language into machine code. The first high-level programming languages, or third-generation programming languages (3GL), were written in the 1950s.

In computer science, a high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer.

FLOW-MATIC was a major influence in the design of COBOL, since only it and its direct descendant AIMACO were in actual use at the time.

COBOL (an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use.

By purpose, programming languages might be considered general purpose, system programming languages, scripting languages, domain-specific languages, or concurrent/distributed languages (or a combination of these).

A system programming language is a programming language used for system programming; such languages are designed for writing system software, which usually requires different development approaches when compared with application software.

A low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture—commands or functions in the language map closely to processor instructions.

Most programming languages consist of instructions for computers.

Machine code is a strictly numerical language which is intended to run as fast as possible, and may be regarded as the lowest-level representation of a compiled or assembled computer program or as a primitive and hardware-dependent programming language.

APL (named after the book A Programming Language) is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson.

Edsger Dijkstra, in a famous 1968 letter published in the Communications of the ACM, argued that GOTO statements should be eliminated from all "higher level" programming languages.

GoTo (goto, GOTO, GO TO or other case combinations, depending on the programming language) is a statement found in many computer programming languages.

ALGOL (short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages, originally developed in the mid-1950s, which greatly influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in textbooks and academic sources for more than thirty years.