imacros-scripting

A programming language is a formal language comprising a set of instructions that produce various kinds of output. Programming languages are used in computer programming to implement algorithms. Most programming languages consist of instructions for computers. There are programmable machines that use a set of specific instructions, rather than general programming languages. Early ones preceded the invention of the digital computer, the first probably being the automatic flute player described in the 9th century by the brothers Musa in Baghdad, during the Islamic Golden Age. Since the early 1800s, programs have been used to direct the behavior of machines such as Jacquard looms, music boxes and player pianos. The programs for these machines (such as a player piano's scrolls) did not produce different behavior in response to different inputs or conditions. Thousands of different programming languages have been created, and more are being created every year. Many programming languag...

A programming language is a notation for writing programs, which are specifications of a computation or algorithm. Some authors restrict the term "programming language" to those languages that can express all possible algorithms. Traits often considered important for what constitutes a programming language include: Function and target A computer programming language is a language used to write computer programs, which involves a computer performing some kind of computation or algorithm and possibly control external devices such as printers, disk drives, robots, and so on. For example, PostScript programs are frequently created by another program to control a computer printer or display. More generally, a programming language may describe computation on some, possibly abstract, machine. It is generally accepted that a complete specification for a programming language includes a description, possibly idealized, of a machine or processor for that language. In most practical co...

Early developments edit Very early computers, such as Colossus, were programmed without the help of a stored program, by modifying their circuitry or setting banks of physical controls. Slightly later, programs could be written in machine language, where the programmer writes each instruction in a numeric form the hardware can execute directly. For example, the instruction to add the value in two memory location might consist of 3 numbers: an "opcode" that selects the "add" operation, and two memory locations. The programs, in decimal or binary form, were read in from punched cards, paper tape, magnetic tape or toggled in on switches on the front panel of the computer. Machine languages were later termed first-generation programming languages (1GL). The next step was the development of the so-called second-generation programming languages (2GL) or assembly languages, which were still closely tied to the instruction set architecture of the specific computer. These...

All programming languages have some primitive building blocks for the description of data and the processes or transformations applied to them (like the addition of two numbers or the selection of an item from a collection). These primitives are defined by syntactic and semantic rules which describe their structure and meaning respectively. Syntax edit A programming language's surface form is known as its syntax. Most programming languages are purely textual; they use sequences of text including words, numbers, and punctuation, much like written natural languages. On the other hand, there are some programming languages which are more graphical in nature, using visual relationships between symbols to specify a program. The syntax of a language describes the possible combinations of symbols that form a syntactically correct program. The meaning given to a combination of symbols is handled by semantics (either formal or hard-coded in a reference implementation). Since most languages a...

Programming languages share properties with natural languages related to their purpose as vehicles for communication, having a syntactic form separate from its semantics, and showing language families of related languages branching one from another. But as artificial constructs, they also differ in fundamental ways from languages that have evolved through usage. A significant difference is that a programming language can be fully described and studied in its entirety since it has a precise and finite definition. By contrast, natural languages have changing meanings given by their users in different communities. While constructed languages are also artificial languages designed from the ground up with a specific purpose, they lack the precise and complete semantic definition that a programming language has. Many programming languages have been designed from scratch, altered to meet new needs, and combined with other languages. Many have eventually fallen into disuse. Although there hav...

This section does not cite any sources . Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( July 2015 ) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Although most of the most commonly used programming languages have fully open specifications and implementations, many programming languages exist only as proprietary programming languages with the implementation available only from a single vendor, which may claim that such a proprietary language is their intellectual property. Proprietary programming languages are commonly domain specific languages or internal scripting languages for a single product; some proprietary languages are used only internally within a vendor, while others are available to external users. Some programming languages exist on the border between proprietary and open; for example, Oracle Corporation asserts proprietary rights to some aspects of the Java programming language, and Mi...