Chapter

One
Preliminaries, including
– Why study PL concepts?
– Programming domains
– PL evaluation criteria
– What influences PL design?
– Tradeoffs faced by programming languages
– Implementation methods
– Programming environments

Copyright © 1998 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 1

 Why study
Programming
Language Concepts?
• Increased capacity to express programming
concepts
• Improved background for choosing appropriate
languages
• Increased ability to learn new languages
• Understanding the significance of
implementation
• Increased ability to design new languages
• Overall advancement of computing

Copyright © 1998 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 2

 Programming
Domains
• Scientific applications
• Business applications
• Artificial intelligence
• Systems programming
• Scripting languages
• Special purpose languages

Copyright © 1998 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 3

 Language Evaluation
Criteria
• Readability
• Writability
• Reliability
• Cost
• Etc…

Copyright © 1998 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 4

 Evaluation Criteria:
How is it for oneReadability
to read and understand programs
written in the PL?
Arguably the most important criterion!
Factors effecting readability include:
– Overall simplicity
» Too many features is bad Orthogonality
» Makes the language easy to learn and read
» Meaning is context independent
– Control statements
– Data type and structures
– Syntax considerations

Copyright © 1998 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 5

 Evaluation Criteria:
Writability
How easy is it to write programs in the
language?
Factors effecting writability:
– Simplicity and orthogonality
– Support for abstraction
– Expressivity
– Fit for the domain and problem

Copyright © 1998 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 6

 Evaluation Criteria:
Reliability

Factors:
- Type checking
- Exception handling
- Aliasing
- Readability and writability

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 Evaluation Criteria:
Cost
Categories:
–Programmer training
–Software creation
–Compilation
–Execution
–Compiler cost
–Poor reliability
–Maintenance

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 Evaluation Criteria:
others

Portability
Generality
Well-definedness
Etc…

Copyright © 1998 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 9

 Language Design
Influences
Computer architecture
- We use imperative languages, at least in part,
because we use von Neumann machines
- John von Neuman is generally considered to be
the inventor of the "stored program" digital
computer - the class to which most of today's
computers belong.
- CPU+memory which contains both program
and data
- Focus on moving data and program instructions
between registers in CPU to memory locations
Copyright © 1998 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 10
 Language Design Influences:
Programming
methodologies
• 1950s and early 1960s: Simple applications;
worry about machine efficiency
• Late 60s: People efficiency became
important; readability, better control
structures. maintainability
• Late 70s: Data abstraction
• Middle 80s: Object-oriented programming
• 95-today: distributed programs, the Web

Copyright © 1998 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 11

 Language
Categories
The big four:
Imperative or procedural (e.g. Fortran, C)
Functional (e.g. Lisp, ML)
Rule-based (e.g. Prolog)
Object-oriented (e.g. Smalltalk, Java)
Others:
Scripting (e.g. Perl, Tcl/Tk)
Constraint (e.g. Eclipse)

Copyright © 1998 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 12

 Language Design Trade-
offs
Reliability versus cost of execution
Ada, unlike C, checks all array indices to ensure
proper range.
Writability versus readability
(2 = 0 +.= T o.| T) / T <- iN is an APL one liner
that produces a list of the prime numbers from 1
to N inclusive.
Flexibility versus safety
C, unlike Java, allows one to do arithmetic
on pointers.

Copyright © 1998 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 13

 Implementation
• Direct executionmethods
by hardware
– e.g., machine language
• Compilation to another language
– e.g., C
• Interpretation
– Direct execution by software
– e.g., csh, Lisp (traditionally)
• Hybrid
– Compilation to another language (aka bytecode) which
is then interpreted
– e.g., Java, Perl

Copyright © 1998 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 14

 Implementation
issues
• Complexity of compiler/interpreter
• Speed of translation
• Speed of execution
• Portability of translated code
• Compactness of translated code
• Debugging ease

compile hybrid interpret

Copyright © 1998 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 15

 Programming
Environments
The collection of tools used in software
development, often including an integrated
editor, debugger, compiler, collaboration tool,
etc.
Examples:
– UNIX -- Operating system with tool collection
– EMACS – a highly programmable text editor
– Borland C++ -- A PC environment for C and C++
– Smalltalk -- A language processor/environment
– Microsoft Visual C++ -- A large, complex visual
environment
– Your favorite Java environment: Jbuilder, J++, …
Copyright © 1998 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 16