In the pedagogy of programming languages, one well-known course structure is to tour multiple languages as a means of touring paradigms. This tour-of-paradigms approach has long received criticism as lacking depth, distracting students from foundational issues in language theory and implementation. This paper argues for disentangling the idea of a tour-of-languages from the tour-of-paradigms. We make this argument by presenting, in depth, a series of case studies included in the Human-Centered Programming Languages curriculum. In this curriculum, case studies become deep, serving to tour the different intellectual foundations through which a scholar can approach programming languages, which one could call the tour-of-humans. In particular, the design aspect of programming languages has much to learn from the social sciences and humanities, yet these intellectual foundations would yield far fewer deep contributions if we did not permit them to employ case studies.
If code is law, then the language of law is a programming language. Lawyers and legal scholars can learn about law by studying programming-language theory, and programming-language tools can be usefully applied to legal problems. This article surveys the history of research on programming languages and law and presents ten promising avenues for future efforts. Its goals are to explain how the combination of programming languages and law is distinctive within the broader field of computer science and law, and to demonstrate with concrete examples the remarkable power of programming-language con…
Comparison of programming languages is a common topic of discussion among software engineers. Multiple programming languages are designed, specified, and implemented every year in order to keep up with the changing programming paradigms, hardware evolution, etc. In this paper we present a comparative study between six programming languages: C++, PHP, C#, Java, Python, VB ; These languages are compared under the characteristics of reusability, reliability, portability, availability of compilers and tools, readability, efficiency, familiarity and expressiveness.
Event-driven programming is used in many fields of modern Computer Science. In event-driven programming languages user interacts with a program by triggering the events. We propose a new approach that we denote command-event driven programming in which the user interacts with a program by means of events and commands. We describe a new programming language, T2Script, which is based on command-event driven paradigm. T2Script has been already implemented and used in one of industrial products. We describe the rationale, basic concepts and advanced programming techniques of new T2Script language.…
Suenaga and Hasuo introduced a nonstandard programming language ${\bf While}^{\bf dt}$ which models hybrid systems. We demonstrate why ${\bf While}^{\bf dt}$ is not suitable for modeling actual computations.
We have designed a new logic programming language called LM (Linear Meld) for programming graph-based algorithms in a declarative fashion. Our language is based on linear logic, an expressive logical system where logical facts can be consumed. Because LM integrates both classical and linear logic, LM tends to be more expressive than other logic programming languages. LM programs are naturally concurrent because facts are partitioned by nodes of a graph data structure. Computation is performed at the node level while communication happens between connected nodes. In this paper, we present the s…
Many popular open source programming languages (Perl, Ruby or Python for example) have systems for distributing packaged source code that software developers can use when working in that particular programming language. This paper will consider the design principals that should be followed if designing such an open source code repository.
Context: Generic programming, as defined by Stepanov, is a methodology for writing efficient and reusable algorithms by considering only the required properties of their underlying data types and operations. Generic programming has proven to be an effective means of constructing libraries of reusable software components in languages that support it. Generics-related language design choices play a major role in how conducive generic programming is in practice. Inquiry: Several mainstream programming languages (e.g. Java and C++) were first created without generics; features to support generic p…
This is a survey on the programming languages: C++, JavaScript, AspectJ, C#, Haskell, Java, PHP, Scala, Scheme, and BPEL. Our survey work involves a comparative study of these ten programming languages with respect to the following criteria: secure programming practices, web application development, web service composition, OOP-based abstractions, reflection, aspect orientation, functional programming, declarative programming, batch scripting, and UI prototyping. We study these languages in the context of the above mentioned criteria and the level of support they provide for each one of them.
Recently, user-centered methods have been proposed to improve the design of programming languages. In order to explore what benefits these methods might have for novice programming language designers, we taught a collection of user-centered programming language design methods to a group of eight students. We observed that natural programming and usability studies helped the students refine their language designs and identify opportunities for improvement, even in the short duration of a course project.
Modern computer programming languages are governed by complex syntactic rules. They are unlike natural languages; they require extensive manual work and a significant amount of learning and practicing for an individual to become skilled at and to write correct programs. Computer programming is a difficult, complicated, unfamiliar, non-automated, and a challenging discipline for everyone; especially, for students, new programmers and end-users. This paper proposes a new programming language and an environment for writing computer applications based on source-code generation. It is mainly a temp…
Comparison of programming languages is a common topic of discussion among software engineers. Few languages ever become sufficiently popular that they are used by more than a few people or find their niche in research or education; but professional programmers can easily use dozens of different languages during their career. Multiple programming languages are designed, specified, and implemented every year in order to keep up with the changing programming paradigms, hardware evolution, etc. In this paper we present a comparative study between ten programming languages: Haskell, Java, Perl, C++…
A multitude of different probabilistic programming languages exists today, all extending a traditional programming language with primitives to support modeling of complex, structured probability distributions. Each of these languages employs its own probabilistic primitives, and comes with a particular syntax, semantics and inference procedure. This makes it hard to understand the underlying programming concepts and appreciate the differences between the different languages. To obtain a better understanding of probabilistic programming, we identify a number of core programming concepts underly…
Control Network Programming (CNP) is a programming paradigm which is being described with the maxim "Primitives + Control Network = Control Network program". It is a type of graphic programming. The Control Network is a recursive system of graphs; it can be a purely descriptive specification of the problem being solved. Clearly, "drawing" the control network does not include any programming. The Primitives are elementary, easily understandable and clearly specified actions. Ultimately, they have to be programmed. Historically, they are usually coded in Free Pascal. The actual code of the primi…
By paying more attention to semantics-based tool generation, programming language semantics can significantly increase its impact. Ultimately, this may lead to ``Language Design Assistants'' incorporating substantial amounts of semantic knowledge.
This volume contains the post-proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Quantitative Aspects of Programming Languages and Systems (QAPL), held as a satellite workshop of ETAPS 2016 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, on 2-3 April 2016.
GitHub is the most widely used social, distributed version control system. It has around 10 million registered users and hosts over 16 million public repositories. Its user base is also very active as GitHub ranks in the top 100 Alexa most popular websites. In this study, we collect GitHub's state in its entirety. Doing so, allows us to study new aspects of the ecosystem. Although GitHub is the home to millions of users and repositories, the analysis of users' activity time-series reveals that only around 10% of them can be considered active. The collected dataset allows us to investigate the …
There are many programming languages in the world today.Each language has their advantage and disavantage. In this paper, we will discuss ten programming languages: C++, C#, Java, Groovy, JavaScript, PHP, Schalar, Scheme, Haskell and AspectJ. We summarize and compare these ten languages on ten different criterion. For example, Default more secure programming practices, Web applications development, OO-based abstraction and etc. At the end, we will give our conclusion that which languages are suitable and which are not for using in some cases. We will also provide evidence and our analysis on w…
Programming languages are engineered languages that allow to instruct a machine and share algorithmic information; they have a great influence on the society since they underlie almost every information technology artefact, and they are at the core of the current explosion of software technology. The history of programming languages is marked by innovations, diversifications, lateral transfers and social influences; moreover, it represents an intermediate case study between the evolution of human languages and the evolution of technology. In this paper we study the application of the Darwinian…
High-level reversible programming languages are few and far between and in general offer only rudimentary abstractions from the details of the underlying machine. Modern programming languages offer a wide array of language constructs and paradigms to facilitate the design of abstract interfaces, but we currently have a very limited understanding of the applicability of such features for reversible programming languages. We introduce the first reversible object-oriented programming language, ROOPL, with support for user-defined data types, class inheritance and subtype-polymorphism. The languag…
This index covers the lecture notes and the final course project reports for COMP6411 Summer 2010 at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, Comparative Study of Programming Languages by 4 teams trying compare a set of common criteria and their applicability to about 10 distinct programming languages, where 5 language choices were provided by the instructor and five were picked by each team and each student individually compared two of the 10 and then the team did a summary synthesis across all 10 languages. Their findings are posted here for further reference, comparative studies, and analysi…
A unit test is a method for verifying the accuracy and the proper functioning of a portion of a program. This work consists to study the relation and the approaches to test Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) programs and to propose a metamodel that enables the programmer to write the tests while writing the source code to be tested by exploiting the key features of OOP programming languages such as inheritance, polymorphism, etc.
Anglican is a probabilistic programming system designed to interoperate with Clojure and other JVM languages. We introduce the programming language Anglican, outline our design choices, and discuss in depth the implementation of the Anglican language and runtime, including macro-based compilation, extended CPS-based evaluation model, and functional representations for probabilistic paradigms, such as a distribution, a random process, and an inference algorithm. We show that a probabilistic functional language can be implemented efficiently and integrated tightly with a conventional functional …
The aim of this work is to define and implement an extended C++ language to support the SIMD programming paradigm. The C++ programming language has been extended to express all the potentiality of an abstract SIMD machine consisting of a central Control Processor and a N-dimensional toroidal array of Numeric Processors. Very few extensions have been added to the standard C++ with the goal of minimising the effort for the programmer in learning a new language and to keep very high the performance of the compiled code. The proposed language has been implemented as a porting of the GNU C++ Compil…
Lecture notes for the Comparative Studies of Programming Languages course, COMP6411, taught at the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada. These notes include a compiled book of primarily related articles from the Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, as well as Comparative Programming Languages book and other resources, including our own. The original notes were compiled by Dr. Paquet.
Quantum computer programming is emerging as a new subject domain from multidisciplinary research in quantum computing, computer science, mathematics (especially quantum logic, lambda calculi, and linear logic), and engineering attempts to build the first non-trivial quantum computer. This paper briefly surveys the history, methods, and proposed tools for programming quantum computers circa late 2007. It is intended to provide an extensive but non-exhaustive look at work leading up to the current state-of-the-art in quantum computer programming. Further, it is an attempt to analyze the needed p…
PLACES 2013 (full title: Programming Language Approaches to Concurrency- and Communication-cEntric Software) was the sixth edition of the PLACES workshop series. After the first PLACES, which was affiliated to DisCoTec in 2008, the workshop has been part of ETAPS every year since 2009 and is now an established part of the ETAPS satellite events. This year, PLACES was the best attended workshop at ETAPS 2013. The workshop series was started in order to promote the application of novel programming language ideas to the increasingly important problem of developing software for systems in which co…
A computer program is a set of electronic instructions executed from within the computer memory by the computer central processing unit. Its purpose is to control the functionalities of the computer allowing it to perform various tasks. Basically, a computer program is written by humans using a programming language. A programming language is the set of grammatical rules and vocabulary that governs the correct writing of a computer program. In practice, the majority of the existing programming languages are written in English-speaking countries and thus they all use the English language to expr…
In this paper we introduce the Functional Modelling System (FMS). The system introduces the Functional Modelling Language (FML), which is a modelling language for NP-complete search problems based on concepts of functional programming. Internally, we translate FML specifications to an Answer Set Program to obtain models. We give a general overview of the new FML language, and how this language is handled in the system. We give a step-by-step walkthrough of the system, pointing out what features are in place, and what improvements are still possible.
GP 2 is an experimental programming language for computing by graph transformation. An initial interpreter for GP 2, written in the functional language Haskell, provides a concise and simply structured reference implementation. Despite its simplicity, the performance of the interpreter is sufficient for the comparative investigation of a range of test programs. It also provides a platform for the development of more sophisticated implementations.
The ever-increasing need for random numbers is clear in many areas of computer science, from neural networks to optimization. As such, most common programming language provide easy access to Pseudorandom Number Generators. However, these generators are not all made equal, and empirical verification has previously shown some to be flawed in key ways. Because of the constant changes in programming languages, we perform the same empirical benchmarking using large batteries of statistcal tests on a wide array of PRNGs, and identify that while some languages have improved significantly over the yea…
Sequential programming and work-flow programming are two useful, but radically different, ways of describing computational processing. Of the two, it is sequential programming that we teach all programmers and support by programming languages, whether in procedural, objectoriented, or functional paradigms. We teach workflow as a secondary style of problem decomposition for use in special situations, like distributed or networked processing. Both styles offer complementary advantages, but the fact that they employ radically different models for ownership of continuations interferes with our abi…
Since the advent of LISP, the fifth generation programming language has developed for decades. However, compared with the fourth generation programming language, the fifth generation programming language has not been widely used because of its obscure semantics, rigorous representation of problems, and limited inference ability. For this reason, COOL (Constraint and Object Ordered Language), a fifth generation programming language proposed in this paper, overcomes the problems of intuitive semantics, rigorous restrictions on handling problem conditions, and improves the inference ability of pr…
There are tools to ease the 2D/3D graphics development for programmers. Sometimes, these are not directly accessible for all users requiring commercial licenses or based on trials, or long learning periods before to use them. In the modern world, the time to release final programs is crucial for the company successfully, also for saving money. Then, if programmers can handle tools to minimize the development time using well-known programming languages, they can deliver final programs on time, with minimum effort. This concept is the goal of this paper, offering a tool to create 3D renders over…
Dynamic software adaptability is one of the central features leveraged by autonomic computing. However, developing software that changes its behavior at run time adapting to the operational conditions is a challenging task. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to attack this problem at different and complementary abstraction levels: software architecture, middleware, and programming level. We focus on the support that ad-hoc programming language constructs may provide to support dynamically adaptive behaviors. We introduce context-oriented programming languages and we presen…
Parsing Expression Grammars are a popular foundation for describing syntax. Unfortunately, several syntax of programming languages are still hard to recognize with pure PEGs. Notorious cases appears: typedef-defined names in C/C++, indentation-based code layout in Python, and HERE document in many scripting languages. To recognize such PEG-hard syntax, we have addressed a declarative extension to PEGs. The "declarative" extension means no programmed semantic actions, which are traditionally used to realize the extended parsing behavior. Nez is our extended PEG language, including symbol tables…
While modern software development heavily uses versioned packages, programming languages rarely support the concept of versions in their semantics, which makes software updates more bulky and unsafe. This paper proposes a programming language that intrinsically supports versions. The main goals are to design core language features to support multiple versions in one program and establish a proper notion of type safety with those features. The proposed core calculus, called Lambda VL, has versioned values, each containing different values under different versions. We show the construction of th…
Search strategies are crucial to efficiently solve constraint satisfaction problems. However, programming search strategies in the existing constraint solvers is a daunting task and constraint-based languages usually have compositionality issues. We propose spacetime programming, a paradigm extending the synchronous language Esterel and timed concurrent constraint programming with backtracking, for creating and composing search strategies. In this formalism, the search strategies are composed in the same way as we compose concurrent processes. Our contributions include the design and behaviora…
JuMP is an algebraic modeling language embedded in the Julia programming language. JuMP allows users to model optimization problems of a variety of kinds, including linear programming, integer programming, conic optimization, semidefinite programming, and nonlinear programming, and handles the low-level details of communicating with solvers. After nearly 10 years in development, JuMP 1.0 was released in March, 2022. In this short communication, we highlight the improvements to JuMP from recent releases up to and including 1.0.
This publication is to present a summary of research (referred as Klabs - http://www.kappalabs.org) carried out in author's Ph.D studies on topic of application of Logic Programming as scripting language for virtual character behavior control in First Person Shooter (FPS) games. The research goal is to apply reasoning and knowledge representation techniques to create character behavior, which results in increased players' engagement. An extended abstract / full version of a paper accepted to be presented at the Doctoral Consortium of the 30th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP…
This paper presents PFLP, a library for probabilistic programming in the functional logic programming language Curry. It demonstrates how the concepts of a functional logic programming language support the implementation of a library for probabilistic programming. In fact, the paradigms of functional logic and probabilistic programming are closely connected. That is, language characteristics from one area exist in the other and vice versa. For example, the concepts of non-deterministic choice and call-time choice as known from functional logic programming are related to and coincide with stoch…
Smart contracts on a blockchain behave precisely as specified by their code. A vulnerability in this code can lead to unexpected behaviour, which is hard to fix because a blockchain does not allow to change smart contract code after its deployment. Such vulnerabilities have led to several incidents. In the aftermath of such an event, a hard-fork between Ethereum and Ethereum classic was the result. This thesis proposes to develop a new smart contract programming language with the primary focus on safety, auditability, and the intention to prevent as many of the known categories of vulnerabilit…
In this paper we examine how concurrency has been embodied in mainstream programming languages. In particular, we rely on the evolutionary talking borrowed from biology to discuss major historical landmarks and crucial concepts that shaped the development of programming languages. We examine the general development process, occasionally deepening into some language, trying to uncover evolutionary lineages related to specific programming traits. We mainly focus on concurrency, discussing the different abstraction levels involved in present-day concurrent programming and emphasizing the fact tha…
Denotational models should provide an opportunity for the revision of current practices seen in the manuals of programming languages. New styles should on one hand base on denotational models but on the other - do not assume that today readers are acquainted in this field. A manual should, therefore, provide some basic knowledge and notation needed to understand the definition of a programming language written in a new style. At the same time - I strongly believe that - it should be written for professional programmers rather than for amateurs. The role of a manual is not to teach the skills o…
Change in language use is driven by cultural forces; it is unclear whether that extends to programming languages. They are designed to be used by humans, but interaction with computer hardware rather than a human audience may limit opportunities for evolution of the lexicon of used terms. I tested this in R, an open source, mature and commonly used programming language for statistical computing. In corpus of 360,321 GitHub repositories published between 2014 and 2021, I extracted 168,857,044 function calls to act as n-grams of the R language. Over the eight-year period, R rapidly diversified a…
Context: Software development tools should work and behave consistently across different programming languages, so that developers do not have to familiarize themselves with new tooling for new languages. Also, being able to combine multiple programming languages in a program increases reusability, as developers do not have to recreate software frameworks and libraries in the language they develop in and can reuse existing software instead. Inquiry: However, developers often have a broad choice of tools, some of which are designed for only one specific programming language. Various Integrated …
Tierless Web programming languages allow programmers to combine client-side and server-side programming in a single program. Programmers can then define components with both client and server parts and get flexible, efficient and typesafe client-server communications. However, the expressive client-server features found in most tierless languages are not necessarily compatible with functionalities found in many mainstream languages. In particular, we would like to benefit from type safety, an efficient execution, static compilation, modularity and separate compilation. In this paper, we propos…
The main purpose of this article is to describe the taxonomy of computer languages according to the levels of abstraction. There exists so many computer languages because of so many reasons like the evolution of better computer languages over the time; the socio-economic factors as the proprietary interests, commercial advantages; expressive power; ease of use of novice; orientation toward special purposes; orientation toward special hardware; and diverse ideas about most suitability. Moreover, the important common properties of most of these languages are discussed here. No programming langua…
The book is devoted to two research areas: (1) Designing programming languages along with their denotational models. A denotational model of a language consists of two many-sorted algebras - an algebra of syntax and an algebra of denotations - and a (unique) homomorphism from syntax to denotations called the semantics of the language. (2) Designing sound program-constructors for languages with denotational models. In our approach programs syntactically contain their total-correctness specifications. A program is said to be correct if it is correct wrt its specification. A program-constructor i…
Easily programming behaviors is one major issue of a large and reconfigurable deployment in the Internet of Things. Such kind of devices often requires to externalize part of their behavior such as the sensing, the data aggregation or the code offloading. Most existing context-oriented programming languages integrate in the same class or close layers the whole behavior. We propose to abstract and separate the context tracking from the decision process, and to use event-based handlers to interconnect them. We keep a very easy declarative and non-layered programming model. We illustrate by defin…
As recent programming languages provide improved conciseness and flexibility of syntax, the development of embedded or internal Domain-Specific Languages has increased. The field of Modeling and Simulation has had a long history of innovation in programming languages (e.g. Simula-67, GPSS). Much effort has gone into the development of Simulation Programming Languages. The ScalaTion project is working to develop an embedded or internal Domain-Specific Language for Modeling and Simulation which could streamline language innovation in this domain. One of its goals is to make the code concise, rea…
