IMPLEMENTATION OF
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES)
Lecture 1 Preliminaries
Perl Gasmen
Department of Physical Sciences and Mathematics
University of the Philippines Manila
OVERVIEW
Motivation
Programming Domains
Language Categories
Implementation Methods
Programming Environments
WHY STUDY PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
WHY STUDY PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
Increased ability to express ideas
Business applications
– Produce reports, use decimal numbers and
characters
Artificial intelligence
– Symbols rather than numbers are
manipulated
PROGRAMMING DOMAINS
Systems programming
– Need efficiency because of continuous use
Scripting languages
– Put a list of commands in a file to be
executed
Special-purpose languages
LANGUAGE EVALUATION CRITERIA
Readability
Writability
Reliability
Cost
etc…
READABILITY (UNDERSTANDS PROGRAMS)
The most important criterium
Factors affecting readability:
Overall simplicity
Too many features is bad as well as the multiplicity of
features
Orthogonality
Makes the language easy to learn and read
Meaning is context independent
Factors:
Simplicity and orthogonality
Support for abstraction
Expressivity
RELIABILITY
A program is said to be reliable if it performs to
its specifications under all conditions.
Factors:
Type checking
Exception handling
Aliasing
Readability and writability
COST
Programmer training
Writing programs (writability)
Compiling programs
Syntax: P1(P2(P3(X)))
Pure Interpretation
Fast execution
Slow execution