Boilerplate text

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Boilerplate text, or simply boilerplate, is any written text (copy) that can be reused in new contexts or applications without significant changes to the original. The term is used about statements, contracts, and computer code, and is often used in the media pejoratively to refer to cliched or unoriginal writing.

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Etymology

"Boiler plate" originally referred to the rolled steel used to make boilers to heat water. [1] [2] Metal printing plates (type metal) used in hot metal typesetting of prepared text such as advertisements or syndicated columns were distributed to small, local newspapers, and became known as 'boilerplates' by analogy. One large supplier to newspapers of this kind of boilerplate was the Western Newspaper Union, which supplied "ready-to-print stories [which] contained national or international news" to papers with smaller geographic footprints, which could include advertisements pre-printed next to the conventional content. [3]

Boilerplate language

In contract law, the term "boilerplate language" or "boilerplate clause" describes the parts of a contract that are considered standard. A standard form contract or boilerplate contract is a contract between two parties, where the terms and conditions of the contract are set by one of the parties, and the other party has little or no ability to negotiate more favorable terms and is thus placed in a "take it or leave it" position.

Boilerplate language may also exist in pre-created form letters. The person sending the form letter then usually only needs to add his or her name at the end of the pre-written greeting and body. Typically, the sender of such a letter needs to personalize it minimally, often by just adding their name or specific details to a pre-written greeting and body, making these templates highly practical for mass communication or repetitive correspondence.

Boilerplate code

In computer programming, boilerplate is the sections of code that have to be included in many places with little or no alteration. Such boilerplate code is particularly salient when the programmer must include a lot of code for minimal functionality. [4]

A related phenomenon, bookkeeping code, is code that is not part of the business logic, but is interleaved with it to keep data structures updated or able to handle secondary aspects of the program.

Boilerplate statement

A boilerplate statement or response generally refers to a message used with minimal effort for multiple different situations. Examples include official statements from government officials such as "Our thoughts and prayers are with those affected" or messages left by companies' voicemail such as "Thank you for holding. Your call is very important to us."[ citation needed ]

See also

Related Research Articles

Computer programming or coding is the composition of sequences of instructions, called programs, that computers can follow to perform tasks. It involves designing and implementing algorithms, step-by-step specifications of procedures, by writing code in one or more programming languages. Programmers typically use high-level programming languages that are more easily intelligible to humans than machine code, which is directly executed by the central processing unit. Proficient programming usually requires expertise in several different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, details of programming languages and generic code libraries, specialized algorithms, and formal logic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Transclusion</span> Including one data set inside another automatically

In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of part or all of an electronic document into one or more other documents by reference via hypertext. Transclusion is usually performed when the referencing document is displayed, and is normally automatic and transparent to the end user. The result of transclusion is a single integrated document made of parts assembled dynamically from separate sources, possibly stored on different computers in disparate places.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Macro (computer science)</span> Rule for substituting a set input with a set output

In computer programming, a macro is a rule or pattern that specifies how a certain input should be mapped to a replacement output. Applying a macro to an input is known as macro expansion. The input and output may be a sequence of lexical tokens or characters, or a syntax tree. Character macros are supported in software applications to make it easy to invoke common command sequences. Token and tree macros are supported in some programming languages to enable code reuse or to extend the language, sometimes for domain-specific languages.

In computer science, pseudocode is a description of the steps in an algorithm using a mix of conventions of programming languages with informal, usually self-explanatory, notation of actions and conditions. Although pseudocode shares features with regular programming languages, it is intended for human reading rather than machine control. Pseudocode typically omits details that are essential for machine implementation of the algorithm. The programming language is augmented with natural language description details, where convenient, or with compact mathematical notation. The purpose of using pseudocode is that it is easier for people to understand than conventional programming language code, and that it is an efficient and environment-independent description of the key principles of an algorithm. It is commonly used in textbooks and scientific publications to document algorithms and in planning of software and other algorithms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simula</span> Early object-oriented programming language

Simula is the name of two simulation programming languages, Simula I and Simula 67, developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard. Syntactically, it is an approximate superset of ALGOL 60, and was also influenced by the design of Simscript.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interpreter (computing)</span> Program that executes source code without a separate compilation step

In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly executes instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without requiring them previously to have been compiled into a machine language program. An interpreter generally uses one of the following strategies for program execution:

  1. Parse the source code and perform its behavior directly;
  2. Translate source code into some efficient intermediate representation or object code and immediately execute that;
  3. Explicitly execute stored precompiled bytecode made by a compiler and matched with the interpreter Virtual Machine.

In software engineering and computer science, abstraction is the process of generalizing concrete details, such as attributes, away from the study of objects and systems to focus attention on details of greater importance. Abstraction is a fundamental concept in computer science and software engineering, especially within the object-oriented programming paradigm. Examples of this include:

Lexical tokenization is conversion of a text into meaningful lexical tokens belonging to categories defined by a "lexer" program. In case of a natural language, those categories include nouns, verbs, adjectives, punctuations etc. In case of a programming language, the categories include identifiers, operators, grouping symbols and data types. Lexical tokenization is not the same process as the probabilistic tokenization, used for a large language model's data preprocessing, that encodes text into numerical tokens, using byte pair encoding.

In computer science, a preprocessor is a program that processes its input data to produce output that is used as input in another program. The output is said to be a preprocessed form of the input data, which is often used by some subsequent programs like compilers. The amount and kind of processing done depends on the nature of the preprocessor; some preprocessors are only capable of performing relatively simple textual substitutions and macro expansions, while others have the power of full-fledged programming languages.

Generic programming is a style of computer programming in which algorithms are written in terms of data types to-be-specified-later that are then instantiated when needed for specific types provided as parameters. This approach, pioneered by the ML programming language in 1973, permits writing common functions or types that differ only in the set of types on which they operate when used, thus reducing duplicate code.

Copy-and-paste programming, sometimes referred to as just pasting, is the production of highly repetitive computer programming code, as produced by copy and paste operations. It is primarily a pejorative term; those who use the term are often implying a lack of programming competence and ability to create abstractions. It may also be the result of technology limitations as subroutines or libraries would normally be used instead. However, there are occasions when copy-and-paste programming is considered acceptable or necessary, such as for boilerplate, loop unrolling, or certain programming idioms, and it is supported by some source code editors in the form of snippets.

In computer programming, a software framework is an abstraction in which software, providing generic functionality, can be selectively changed by additional user-written code, thus providing application-specific software. It provides a standard way to build and deploy applications and is a universal, reusable software environment that provides particular functionality as part of a larger software platform to facilitate the development of software applications, products and solutions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">All caps</span> Text with all capital letters

In typography, text or font in all caps contains capital letters without any lowercase letters. For example: THIS TEXT IS IN ALL CAPS. All-caps text can be seen in legal documents, advertisements, newspaper headlines, and the titles on book covers. Short strings of words in capital letters appear bolder and "louder" than mixed case, and this is sometimes referred to as "screaming" or "shouting". All caps can also be used to indicate that a given word is an acronym.

Boilerplate may refer to:

A read–eval–print loop (REPL), also termed an interactive toplevel or language shell, is a simple interactive computer programming environment that takes single user inputs, executes them, and returns the result to the user; a program written in a REPL environment is executed piecewise. The term usually refers to programming interfaces similar to the classic Lisp machine interactive environment. Common examples include command-line shells and similar environments for programming languages, and the technique is very characteristic of scripting languages.

A general-purpose macro processor or general purpose preprocessor is a macro processor that is not tied to or integrated with a particular language or piece of software.

In computer programming, boilerplate code, or simply boilerplate, are sections of code that are repeated in multiple places with little to no variation. When using languages that are considered verbose, the programmer must write a lot of boilerplate code to accomplish only minor functionality.

Template may refer to:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of compiler construction</span>

In computing, a compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language or computer language, into another computer language. The most common reason for transforming source code is to create an executable program.

In computer science, bare machine refers to a computer executing instructions directly on logic hardware without an intervening operating system. Modern operating systems evolved through various stages, from elementary to the present day complex, highly sensitive systems incorporating many services. After the development of programmable computers but prior to the development of operating systems, sequential instructions were executed on the computer hardware directly using machine language without any system software layer. This approach is termed the "bare machine" precursor to modern operating systems. Today it is mostly applicable to embedded systems and firmware with time-critical latency requirements, while conventional programs are run by a runtime system overlaid on an operating system.

References

  1. ↑ "boiler plate", Merriam-Webster Dictionary (online)
  2. ↑ Boilerplate, Dictionary.com
  3. ↑ "Building that was home to boilerplate to become luxury condos" . Retrieved 2024-02-05.
  4. ↑ Lämmel, Ralf; Jones, Simon Peyton (2003). "Scrap your boilerplate: a practical design pattern for generic programming". Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Types in Languages Design and Implementation. TLDI '03. New York: ACM. pp. 26–37. doi:10.1145/604174.604179. ISBN   9781581136494. S2CID   9472305.
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