Chapter 1

Preliminaries

ISBN 0-321-19362-8
 Introduction

Learning Outcomes:
By the end of this module you will be able to:
1. describe the reasons for studying programming languages
2. recognize and compare programming languages evaluation
criteria
3. identify some trade-offs in language design
4. explain the relative merits and demerits of compiled and
interpreted languages

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Topics

• Motivation
• Programming Domains
• Language Evaluation Criteria
• Influences on Language Design
• Language Categories
• Language Design Trade-Offs
• Implementation Methods
• Programming Environments

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What is a Programming Language?

• A language for expressing instructions to a

computer
• A series of instructions written by a programmer
according to a given set of rules or conventions
(“syntax”).
• A computer language that programmers utilize to
create programs. C, Perl, Java, BASIC, and
COBOL are examples of programming
languages.

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Motivation: Why Study Programming
Languages?
• Increased ability to express ideas
– Knowledge of language features increases expressive power
– Similar to natural languages
• Improved background for choosing appropriate languages
– If you know only one language, it may not be the most
appropriate for certain applications
– Imagine writing a multithreaded application when you know
only C
• Greater ability to learn new languages
– Easier to learn how concepts you already know are incorporated
in languages
– A number of differences among languages are syntactic

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Motivation: Why Study Programming
Languages?

• Understand significance of implementation

– Knowledge of language concepts
• increases appreciation of design & implementation choices
• Leads to more intelligent use of the language as it was designed
to be used
• Ability to design new languages
– Design a language with best collection of features
• Overall advancement of computing
– Ability to choose better languages over poor ones (when you are
a Boss!)

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 Programming Domains
• As computers are used in diverse applications, languages
with very different goals have been developed
• Scientific applications – Fortran, Algol 60
– Large number of floating point computations
• Business applications – COBOL
– Produce reports, use decimal numbers and characters
• Artificial intelligence – Lisp, Prolog, Scheme
– Symbols rather than numbers manipulated
• Systems programming – C
– Need efficiency because of continuous use
• Scripting languages – Perl
– Put a list of commands in a file to be executed
• Special-purpose languages
– For business report generation – RPG

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 Language Evaluation Criteria: Readability
• How easy is it to read and understand programs in the
language?
• One of the most important criterion
• Factors influencing readability:
1. Overall simplicity
– Too many features is bad
– Multiplicity of features is bad
2. Orthogonality
– Features of the language have as few restrictions as possible and can
be combined in any meaningful way.
– Language constructs should not behave differently in different
context
– Makes the language easy to learn and read
– Every possible combination is legal
– Lack of orthogonality leads to exceptions to rules
– C examples: by default, arrays are passed by address; array elements
cannot be of void type; arrays cannot be functions’ return type

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Language Evaluation Criteria: Readability (cont’d)

• Readability factors (continued)

3. Control statements
– Readability can improve with adequate control structures rather than
frequent the use of the ‘goto’ statement
4. Defining data types and structures
– Programs in languages with a Boolean type can be more readable
than programs in those without a Boolean type
– Records modeled using structures are more readable than those
modeled using parallel arrays
5. Syntax considerations
– Identifier forms – restricting identifier length hinders use of
connotative names
– Special words – Pascal’s use of begin-end pairs and C’s use of
{ and } to form compound statements
– Form and meaning – semantics should follow from syntax, or form
» Violation: the same keyword, static, in C has meaning
depending on context.

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 Language Evaluation Criteria: Writability

• How easily can the language be used to create an

application from a chosen domain?
• Factors affecting writability:
1. Simplicity and orthogonality
– Most characteristics affecting readability also affect writability
2. Support for abstraction
– Process abstraction offers readability, writability, code re-use and
brevity
– Data abstraction offers greater modeling power, readability and
writability
3. Expressivity
– Having convenient (not cumbersome) and powerful ways of
specifying computation (e.g., APL)
– Makes programs short and concise

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Language Evaluation Criteria: Reliability
• Does the language provide facilities to write programs
that work under all possible conditions?
• Factors affecting reliability:
1. Type checking
– Checking for type errors at compile or runtime
2. Exception handling
– Detecting and handling runtime errors and other unusual conditions
– Enables a program to continue execution after encountering errors
3. Aliasing
– Having two or more names referring to a memory cell
4. Readability and writability
– The more natural the constructs of a language, the more it is easier
to read and write programs.
– Such programs will be more likely to be correct

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 Discussion

/* Program in Language A */
c = 0;
for(int i=0; i<n; i++)
c = c + V[i] * W[i];
System.out.println(c);

/* Program in Language B */
INNERPROD <- + / V x W

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 Language Evaluation Criteria: Cost

• How much does the language cost the client, user

or designer?
• Categories
• Training programmers to use language
• Writing programs
• Compiling programs (reduced with clever compilers)
• Executing programs (reduced with static type checking)
• Language implementation system (reduced with free tools)
• Reliability (can lead to law suits or loss of business)
• Maintaining programs (depends on readability and
writability)

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 Language Evaluation Criteria: Others

• Portability
– Ease of moving programs from one implementation to
another
• Generality
– Applicability to a wide-range of applications
• Well-definedness
– Completeness and precision of the language’s defining
document

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 Influences on Language Design
• Computer architecture: Von Neumann
• We use imperative languages, at least in part,
because we use von Neumann machines
– Data and programs stored in same memory
– Memory is separate from CPU
– Instructions and data are piped from memory to CPU
– Basis for imperative languages
• Variables model memory cells
• Assignment statements model piping
• Iteration is efficient on these computers because
instructions are stored in adjacent cells of memory

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Von Neumann Architecture

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von Neumann Architecture and Imperative Languages

CPU Feature Modeled using language feature

Memory Variables
Load Variable evaluation

Store Assignment
Conditional goto Control structure

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 Influences on Language Design

• Research on programming languages led to the following

programming methodologies
• Structured design – late 1960s
– Better control structures for readability and more programmer productivity
• Data-oriented design – late 1970s
– Encapsulation and information hiding
• Object-oriented design – middle 1980s
– Addition of inheritance and dynamic binding

• Major reasons for the research were

1. Decrease in hardware cost without matching decrease in software cost
2. Programming applications are becoming more and more complex

• Languages were developed to support the concepts in these

methodologies

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Language Categories

• Programming languages are often grouped into

four classes
1. Imperative
• Central features are variables, assignment statements,
and iteration
• Order of executing statements is prescribed
• Examples: C, Pascal
2. Functional
• Main means of making computations is by applying
functions to given parameters
• Order of executing statements does not matter
• Examples: LISP, Scheme, Haskell

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 Language Categories

3. Logic
– Rule-based
– Rules are specified in no special order
– Example: Prolog
4. Object-oriented
– Encapsulate data objects with processing
– Inheritance and dynamic type binding
– Grew out of imperative languages
– Examples: C++, Java, C#

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 Language Design Trade-Offs

• The language evaluation criteria we discussed

are sometime contradictory
– Usually, a design has to trade some for others
• Examples of typical trade-off cases
1. Reliability vs. cost of execution
2. Readability vs. writability
3. Flexibility vs. safety

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Implementation Methods

• Compilation
– Translate high-level
program to machine code
– Slower translation
– Faster execution
– Lack of portability

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Implementation Methods

• Pure interpretation
– No translation
– Slow execution (10-100
time slower than
compilation)
– Becoming rare
– Requires more space since
the symbol table must be
available during
interpretation
– Examples: APL, LISP,
JavaScript, PHP

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Implementation Methods

• Hybrid implementation
systems
– Small translation cost
– Medium execution speed
– Faster than pure
interpretations because
high level language
statements are decoded
only once
– Examples: Perl, Java

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Programming Environments

• The collection of tools used in software

development
• UNIX
– An older operating system and tool collection
• Borland JBuilder
– An integrated development environment for Java
• Microsoft Visual Studio.NET
– A large, complex visual environment
– Used to program in C#, Visual BASIC.NET, Jscript,
J#, or C++

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