CS-Week 1- Programming Language

Assembler

A computer program which translates assembly language to an object file or machine language format.

Syntax Diagram

A diagram system, sometimes referred to as a railroad diagram, which is another way to represent a context-free grammar, developed as a graphic alternative to the Backus Naur form mentioned above.

Programming Language

A formal constructed language designed to communicate instructions to a computer.

Low Level

A language easily understood and executed by a computer, like machine language, assembly, or bytecode.

Pascal

A procedural programming language devised and published by Niklaus Wirth in 1970, primarily intended to teach good structured programming habits.

COBOL

An acronym for common business-oriented language, a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use.

Visual Basic

An event-driven programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft, first released in 1991, to be relatively easy to learn and used to create GUI based programs.

Pseudocode

An informal high-level description of the operating principle of a computer program or other algorithm.

Fortran

One of the original high level languages created by John Backus to make programming easier for math and science applications.

Syntax diagram

Sometimes referred to as railroad diagrams, these are graphical ways to represent a context-free grammar.

Executable Code

The code that is a result of the compile process translated from source code.

Machine language

The language directly understood and executed by a computer, consisting of pure 0s and 1s.

Compiling

The process of transforming source code from a high-level programming language into object code, most typically machine language or bytecode in Java.

Interpreting

The translation process in some programming languages which executes a program one line at a time, instead of compiling the entire program into one executable file.

Code Block

a section of code in a computer program which is grouped together. Consist of one or more declarations and statements.

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML)

A markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format which is both human-readable and machine-readable.

Compiler

A computer program (or set of programs) that transforms source code written in a programming language (the source language) into another computer language (the target language, often having a binary form known as object code). The most common reason for converting a source code is to create an executable program.

BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code)

A family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use.

C

A general, all-purpose programming language developed by Dennis Ritchie in the late 60s and early 70s at the AT&T Bell Labs, which became one of the most widely used programming languages of all time.

Java

A general-purpose computer programming language that is concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, and is designed to run on any platform through the use of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

C++

A general-purpose programming language designed in the late 70s by Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension to the C language with object-oriented data abstraction mechanisms.

Low Level Language

A language easily understood and executed by a computer, like machine language, assembly, or bytecode.

Machine Language

A low-level binary language, consisting of only 0s and 1s, easily understood and executed by the computer, most often the result of a translation process from a high level language using a compiler or interpreter.

Assembly Language

A low-level programming language (difficult for humans, easy for machines) that uses mnemonic opcodes, such as mov, sto, and load, to interact directly with a computer's CPU and registers, used by expert programmers to produce highly efficient and fast programs.

Assembly Language correct

A low-level programming language (difficult for humans, easy for machines) that uses mnemonic opcodes, such as mov, sto, and load, to interact directly with a computer's CPU and registers, used by expert programmers to produce highly efficient and fast programs.

Backus Naur Notation

A notation technique for context-free grammars, often used to describe the syntax of languages used in computing, developed and first introduced by John Backus and Peter Naur as a formal notation to describe the syntax of a given language. It is sufficient to recognize examples of BNF, such as the one shown below.

Backus-Naur

A notation technique for context-free grammars, often used to describe the syntax of languages used in computing.

C++

A programming language also developed at AT&T Bell Labs in the late 70s by Bjarne Stroustrup, derived from C, with added object oriented features.

Object Oriented Programming Language

A programming language paradigm that focuses on the data, where processes belong to the data and are encapsulated into objects based on class definitions using abstraction, inheritance, and polymorphism as key features of design.

Functional Programming Language

A programming language paradigm that focuses on the function, often math based, where recursion is used for iteration processes. Languages of this type include LISP, Scheme, Haskell, and Scala.

Procedural Programming Language

A programming language paradigm that focuses on the procedure, which contains step by step instructions for the computer, primarily using loops for iteration. Languages that fit this category include Fortran, COBOL, Pascal, and C.

High Level Language

A programming language using words and commands easy for humans to understand and organize, but which must be translated into a low-level language like machine language or object code for the computer to understand and execute.

High-level language

A programming language using words and commands easy for humans to understand and organize, but which must be translated into machine language or object code for the computer to understand and execute

Code

A term that refers to the source code, or set of instructions found in a computer program.

Bytecode

A universally portable software file compiled from source code that is then translated into machine language by an interpreter. Java works this way, where a .java file is compiled into a .class file, which contains bytecode, and then is translated by whatever device executes that file, using the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) bytecode interpreter.

Python

A widely used general-purpose, high-level programming language, with a design philosophy that emphasizes code readability.

Pseudocode

An informal high-level description of the operating principle of a computer program or other algorithm. There are many examples of pseudocode similar to the one shown below. The important thing to remember is that pseudocode is non-executable, meant only as a way to easily and clearly express the purpose of a section of code.

Python

An interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics". Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability, and its syntax allows programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code than possible in languages such as C++ or Java.

FORTRAN

One of the original high level languages, short for Formula Translation, created by John Backus to make programming easier for math and science applications.