Comparison of programming languages

Last updated July 02, 2024

Programming languages are used for controlling the behavior of a machine (often a computer). Like natural languages, programming languages follow rules for syntax and semantics.

Most programming languages are not standardized by an international (or national) standard, even widely used ones, such as Perl or Standard ML (despite the name). Notable standardized programming languages include ALGOL, C, C++, JavaScript (under the name ECMAScript), Smalltalk, Prolog, Common Lisp, Scheme (IEEE standard), ISLISP, Ada, Fortran, COBOL, SQL, and XQuery.

General comparison

The following table compares general and technical information for a selection of commonly used programming languages. See the individual languages' articles for further information.

Language	Original purpose	Imperative	Object-oriented	Functional	Procedural	Generic	Reflective	Other paradigms	Standardized
1C:Enterprise programming language	Application, RAD, business, general, web, mobile	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Object-based, Prototype-based programming	No
ActionScript	Application, client-side, web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	prototype-based	Yes 1999-2003, ActionScript 1.0 with ES3, ActionScript 2.0 with ES3 and partial ES4 draft, ActionScript 3.0 with ES4 draft,ActionScript 3.0 with E4X
Ada	Application, embedded, realtime, system	Yes	Yes^[2]	No	Yes^[3]	Yes^[4]	No	Concurrent,^[5] distributed ^[6]	Yes 1983, 2005, 2012, ANSI, ISO, GOST 27831-88^[7]
Aldor	Highly domain-specific, symbolic computing	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No		No
ALGOL 58	Application	Yes	No	No	No	No	No		No
ALGOL 60	Application	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No		Yes 1960, IFIP WG 2.1, ISO^[8]
ALGOL 68	Application	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Concurrent	Yes 1968, IFIP WG 2.1, GOST 27974-88,^[9]
Ateji PX	Parallel application	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	pi calculus	No
APL	Application, data processing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Array-oriented, tacit	Yes 1989, ISO
Assembly language	General	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	Any, syntax is usually highly specific, related to the target processor	Yes 1985 IEEE 694-1985^[10]
AutoHotkey	GUI automation (macros), highly domain-specific	Yes	Yes ^[11]	No	Yes	No	No		No
AutoIt	GUI automation (macros), highly domain-specific	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No		No
Ballerina	Integration, agile, server-side, general	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Concurrent, transactional, statically and strongly typed, diagrammatic–visual	De facto standard via Ballerina Language Specification^[12]
Bash	Shell, scripting	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No		Optionally POSIX.2 ^[13]
BASIC	Application, education	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No		Yes 1983, ANSI, ISO, ECMA
BeanShell	Application, scripting	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes		No In progress, JCP ^[14]
BLISS	System	No	No	No	Yes	No	No		No
BlitzMax	Application, game	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes		No
Boo	Application, game scripting	No	Yes	No	No	No	No		No
C	Application, system,^[15] general purpose, low-level operations	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No		Yes 1989, ANSI C89, ISO/IEC C90, ISO/IEC C95, ISO/IEC C99, ISO/IEC C11, ISO/IEC C17, ISO/IEC C2x ^[16]
C++	Application, system	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No		Yes 1998, ISO/IEC C++98, ISO/IEC C++03, ISO/IEC C++11, ISO/IEC C++14, ISO/IEC C++17, ISO/IEC C++20, ISO/IEC C++23 ^[17]
C#	Application, RAD, business, client-side, general, server-side, web, game programming	Yes	Yes	Yes^[18]	Yes	Yes	Yes	Structured, concurrent	Yes 2000, ECMA, ISO^[19]
Clarion	General, business, web	Yes	Yes	Yes^[20]	No	No	No		Unknown
Clean	General	No	No	Yes	No	Yes	No		No
Clojure	General	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	Concurrent	No
CLU	General	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No		No
COBOL	Application, business	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	No		Yes 1968 ANSI X3.23, 1974, 1985; ISO/IEC 1989:1985, 2002, 2014, 2023
Cobra	Application, business, general, web	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes		No
ColdFusion (CFML)	Web	No	Yes	No	Yes	No	No		No
Common Lisp	General	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Extensible syntax, Array-oriented, syntactic macros, multiple dispatch, concurrent	Yes 1994, ANSI
COMAL 80	Education	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No		No
Crystal	General purpose	Yes	Yes^[21]	Yes	Yes	Yes^[22]	No	Concurrent^[23]	No
Curry	Application	No	No	Yes	No	Yes	No	lazy evaluation, non-determinism	De facto standard via Curry Language Report
Cython	Application, general, numerical computing	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	Aspect-oriented	No
D	Application, system	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Generative, concurrent	No
Dart	Application, web, server-side, mobile, IoT	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Structured	Yes ECMA-408 standard
Delphi, Object Pascal	General purpose	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		?
Dylan	Application	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No		No
Eiffel	General, application, business, client-side, server-side, web (EWF)	Yes	Yes	Yes^[24]^[25]	No	Yes	Yes Erl-G	Distributed SCOOP, Void-safe	Yes 2005, ECMA, ISO^[26]
ELAN	Education	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No	Structured, stepwise refinement	No
Elixir	Application, distributed	No	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	Concurrent, distributed	No
Erlang	Application, distributed	No	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	Concurrent, distributed	No
Euphoria	Application	No	No	No	Yes	No	Yes		No
Factor	General	Yes	No	Can be viewed as	No	Yes	Yes	Stack-oriented	No
FP		No	No	Yes	No	No	No		No
F#	Application	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		No
Forth	General	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Stack-oriented	Yes 1994, ANSI
Fortran	Application, numerical computing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Array-based, vectorized, concurrent, native distributed/shared-memory parallelism	Yes 1966, ANSI 66, ANSI 77, MIL-STD-1753, ISO 90, ISO 95, ISO 2003, ISO/IEC 1539-1:2010 (2008), ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N2145 (2018)
FreeBASIC	Application, numerical computing	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No		No
Gambas	Application	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No		No
Game Maker Language	Application, game programming	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No		No
GLBasic	Application, games	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	Simple object-oriented	No
Go	Application, web, server-side	Yes	Can be viewed as^[27]	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Concurrent	De facto standard via Go Language Specification
Gosu	Application, general, scripting, web	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes		No
GraphTalk	Application	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	Logic	No
Groovy	Application, general, scripting, web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Meta-programming	In progress, JCP ^[28]
Harbour	Application, business, data processing, general, web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Declarative	No
Haskell	Application	No	No	Yes	No	Yes	No	Lazy evaluation	Yes 2010, Haskell 2010^[29]
Haxe	Application, general, web	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes		No
HyperTalk	Application, RAD, general	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	Yes	Weakly typed	Unknown
Io	Application, host-driven scripting	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No		No
IPL	General	No	No	Yes	No	No	No		Unknown
ISLISP	General	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No		Yes 1997, 2007, ISO
J	Application, data processing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Array-oriented, function-level, tacit, concurrent	No
JADE	Application, distributed	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No		No
Java	Application, business, client-side, general, mobile development, server-side, web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Concurrent	De facto standard via Java Language Specification
JavaScript	Client-side, server-side, web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	prototype-based	Yes 1997-2022, ECMA-262
Joy	Research	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	Stack-oriented	No
jq	"awk for JSON"	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	Tacit, Backtracking, Streaming, PEG	No
Julia	General, technical computing	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Multiple dispatch, meta, scalar and array-oriented, parallel, concurrent, distributed ("cloud")	No
K	Data processing, business	No	No	No	No	No	No	Array-oriented, tacit	Unknown
Kotlin	Application, mobile development, server-side, client-side, web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes^[30]		De facto standard via Kotlin Language Specification
Ksh	Shell, scripting	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	Several variants, custom programmable, dynamic loadable modules	Optionally POSIX.2 ^[13]
LabVIEW (G)	Application, industrial instrumentation-automation	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Dataflow, visual	No
Lisp	General	No	No	Yes	No	No	No		Unknown
LiveCode	Application, RAD, general	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	Weakly typed	No
Logtalk	Artificial intelligence, application	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	Logic	No
Linden Scripting Language (LSL)	Virtual worlds content scripting and animation	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No	Scripts exist in in-world objects	De facto reference is the Second Life implementation of LSL.^[31]
Lua	Application, embedded scripting	Yes	Yes^[32]	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Aspect-oriented, prototype-based	No^[33]
Maple	Symbolic computation, numerical computing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Distributed	No
Mathematica	Symbolic language	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Logic, distributed	No
MATLAB	Highly domain-specific, numerical computing	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	No		No
Modula-2	Application, system	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	No		Yes 1996, ISO^[34]
Modula-3	Application	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	No		No
MUMPS (M)	General, application, databases	Yes	Approved for next Standard	No	Yes	Partially Thru Indirection and Xecute	Yes	Concurrent, multi-user, NoSQL, transaction processing	Yes 1977 ANSI, 1995, ISO 2020
Nim	Application, general, web, scripting, system	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Multiple dispatch, concurrent, meta	No
Oberon	Application, system	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No		No
Object Pascal	Application, general, mobile app, web	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Structured	No
Objective-C	Application, general	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	Concurrent	No
OCaml	Application, general	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No		No
Occam	General	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No	Concurrent, process-oriented	No
Opa	Web applications	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	No	Distributed	No
OpenLisp	General, Embedded Lisp Engine	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No		Optionally ISLISP
Oxygene	Application	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	No		No
Oz-Mozart	Application, distribution, education	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Concurrent, logic	No
Pascal	Application, education	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No		Yes 1983, ISO^[35]
Perl	Application, scripting, text processing, Web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		No
PHP	Server-side, web application, web	Yes	Yes^[36]	Yes^[37]	Yes	No	Yes		De facto standard via language specification and Requests for Comments (RFCs)
PL/I	Application	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	No		Yes 1969, ECMA-50 (1976)
Plus	Application, system development	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No		No
PostScript	Graphics, page description	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No	Concatenative, stack-oriented	De facto standard via the PostScript Reference Manual^[38]
PowerShell	Administration, application, general, scripting	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Pipeline	No
Prolog	Application, artificial intelligence	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Logic, declarative	Yes 1995, ISO/IEC 13211-1:1995, TC1 2007, TC2 2012, TC3 2017
PureBasic	Application	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No		No
Python	Application, general, web, scripting, artificial intelligence, scientific computing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Aspect-oriented	De facto standard via Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs)
R	Application, statistics	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes		No
Racket	Education, general, scripting	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Modular, logic, meta	No
Raku	Scripting, text processing, glue	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Aspect-oriented, array, lazy evaluation, multiple dispatch, metaprogramming	No
REALbasic	Application	No	No	No	Yes	No	No		Unknown
Rebol	Distributed	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Dialected	No
REXX	Scripting	Yes	Yes (NetRexx and Object REXX dialects)	No	Yes	No	No		Yes 1996 (ANSI X3.274-1996)
RPG	Application, system	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No		No
Ring	Application	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	metaprogramming, declarative, natural-language	No
Ruby	Application, scripting, web	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	Aspect-oriented	Yes 2011(JIS X 3017), 2012(ISO/IEC 30170)
Rust	Application, server-side, system, web	Yes	Yes^[39]	Yes	Yes	Yes	No^[40]	Concurrent	No
S	Application, statistics	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No		No
S-Lang	Application, numerical, scripting	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No		No
Scala	Application, general, parallel, distributed, web	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Data-oriented programming, metaprogramming	De facto standard via Scala Language Specification (SLS)
Scheme	Education, general	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No	meta, extensible-syntax	De facto 1975-2013, R⁰RS, R¹RS, R²RS, R³RS, R⁴RS, R⁵RS, R⁶RS, R⁷RS Small Edition^[41]^[42]
Seed7	Application, general, scripting, web	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	Multi-paradigm, extensible, structured	No
Simula	Education, general	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No	discrete event simulation, multi-threaded (quasi-parallel) program execution	Yes 1968
Small Basic	Application, education, games	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	Component-oriented	No
Smalltalk	Application, general, business, artificial intelligence, education, web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Concurrent, declarative	Yes 1998, ANSI
SNOBOL	Text processing	No	No	No	No	No	No		Unknown
Standard ML	Application	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	No		Yes 1997, SML '97^[43]
Swift	Application, general	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Concurrent, declarative, protocol-oriented	No
Tcl	Application, scripting, web	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes		No
V (Vlang)	Application, general, system, game, web, server-side	Yes	Can be viewed as	Can be viewed as	Yes	Yes	Yes	Concurrent	No
Visual Basic	Application, RAD, education, business, general, (Includes VBA), office automation	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	Component-oriented	No
Visual Basic .NET	Application, RAD, education, web, business, general	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Structured, concurrent	No
Visual FoxPro	Application	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	Data-centric, logic	No
Visual Prolog	Application	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Declarative, logic	No
Wolfram Language	Symbolic language	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Logic, distributed	No
XL		Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No	concept programming	No
Xojo	Application, RAD, general, web	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes		No
XPath/XQuery	Databases, data processing, scripting	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	Tree-oriented	Yes 1999 W3C XPath 1, 2010 W3C XQuery 1, 2014 W3C XPath/XQuery 3.0
Zeek	Domain-specific, application	Yes	No	No	No	No	No		No
Zig	Application, general, system	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Concurrent	No
Zsh	Shell, scripting	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No	Loadable modules	Optionally POSIX.2 ^[13]

Type systems

Failsafe I/O and system calls

Most programming languages will print an error message or throw an exception if an input/output operation or other system call (e.g., chmod, kill) fails, unless the programmer has explicitly arranged for different handling of these events. Thus, these languages fail safely in this regard.

Some (mostly older) languages require that programmers explicitly add checks for these kinds of errors. Psychologically, different cognitive biases (e.g., optimism bias) may affect novices and experts alike and lead them to skip these checks. This can lead to erroneous behavior.

Failsafe I/O is a feature of 1C:Enterprise, Ada (exceptions), ALGOL (exceptions or return value depending on function), Ballerina, C#, Common Lisp ("conditions and restarts" system), Curry, D (throwing on failure),^[44] Erlang, Fortran, Go (unless result explicitly ignored), Gosu, Harbour, Haskell, ISLISP, Java, Julia, Kotlin, LabVIEW, Mathematica, Objective-C (exceptions), OCaml (exceptions), OpenLisp, PHP, Python, Raku, Rebol, Rexx (with optional signal on... trap handling), Ring, Ruby, Rust (unless result explicitly ignored), Scala,^[45] Smalltalk, Standard ML ^{[ citation needed ]}, Swift ≥ 2.0 (exceptions), Tcl, Visual Basic, Visual Basic .NET, Visual Prolog, Wolfram Language, Xojo, XPath/XQuery (exceptions), and Zeek.

No Failsafe I/O: AutoHotkey (global ErrorLevel must be explicitly checked), C,^[46] COBOL, Eiffel (it actually depends on the library and it is not defined by the language), GLBasic (will generally cause program to crash), RPG, Lua (some functions do not warn or throw exceptions), and Perl.^[47]

Some I/O checking is built in C++ (STL iostreams throw on failure but C APIs like stdio or POSIX do not)^[46] and Object Pascal, in Bash ^[48] it is optional.

Expressiveness

Language	Statements ratio^[49]	Lines ratio^[50]
C	1	1
C++	2.5	1
Fortran	2	0.8
Java	2.5	1.5
Perl	6	6
Smalltalk	6	6.25
Python	6	6.5

The literature on programming languages contains an abundance of informal claims about their relative expressive power, but there is no framework for formalizing such statements nor for deriving interesting consequences.^[51] This table provides two measures of expressiveness from two different sources. An additional measure of expressiveness, in GZip bytes, can be found on the Computer Language Benchmarks Game.^[52]

Benchmarks

Benchmarks are designed to mimic a particular type of workload on a component or system. The computer programs used for compiling some of the benchmark data in this section may not have been fully optimized, and the relevance of the data is disputed. The most accurate benchmarks are those that are customized to your particular situation. Other people's benchmark data may have some value to others, but proper interpretation brings many challenges. The Computer Language Benchmarks Game site warns against over-generalizing from benchmark data, but contains a large number of micro-benchmarks of reader-contributed code snippets, with an interface that generates various charts and tables comparing specific programming languages and types of tests.^[55]

Timeline of specific language comparisons

1974 – Comparative Notes on Algol 68 and PL/I^[56] – S. H. Valentine – November 1974
1976 – Evaluation of ALGOL 68, JOVIAL J3B, Pascal, Simula 67, and TACPOL Versus TINMAN – Requirements for a Common High Order Programming Language.
1977 – A comparison of PASCAL and ALGOL 68^[57] – Andrew S. Tanenbaum – June 1977.
1993 – Five Little Languages and How They Grew – BLISS, Pascal, ALGOL 68, BCPL & C – Dennis M. Ritchie – April 1993.
2009 – On Go – oh, go on – How well will Google's Go stand up against Brand X programming language? – David Given – November 2009

Related Research Articles

Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, and object-oriented high-level programming language, inspired by Pascal and other languages. It has built-in language support for design by contract (DbC), extremely strong typing, explicit concurrency, tasks, synchronous message passing, protected objects, and non-determinism. Ada improves code safety and maintainability by using the compiler to find errors in favor of runtime errors. Ada is an international technical standard, jointly defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). As of May 2023, the standard, called Ada 2022 informally, is ISO/IEC 8652:2023.

C is a general-purpose programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs. It has found lasting use in operating systems code, device drivers, and protocol stacks, but its use in application software has been decreasing. C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems.

CLU is a programming language created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by Barbara Liskov and her students starting in 1973. While it did not find extensive use, it introduced many features that are used widely now, and is seen as a step in the development of object-oriented programming (OOP).

In computer programming, operator overloading, sometimes termed operator ad hoc polymorphism, is a specific case of polymorphism, where different operators have different implementations depending on their arguments. Operator overloading is generally defined by a programming language, a programmer, or both.

Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, designed by Niklaus Wirth as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. It is named after French mathematician, philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal.

In computer science, control flow is the order in which individual statements, instructions or function calls of an imperative program are executed or evaluated. The emphasis on explicit control flow distinguishes an imperative programming language from a declarative programming language.

This is a "genealogy" of programming languages. Languages are categorized under the ancestor language with the strongest influence. Those ancestor languages are listed in alphabetic order. Any such categorization has a large arbitrary element, since programming languages often incorporate major ideas from multiple sources.

Programming languages can be grouped by the number and types of paradigms supported.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conditional (computer programming)</span> Control flow statement that executes code according to some condition(s)

In computer science, conditionals are programming language commands for handling decisions. Specifically, conditionals perform different computations or actions depending on whether a programmer-defined Boolean condition evaluates to true or false. In terms of control flow, the decision is always achieved by selectively altering the control flow based on some condition . Although dynamic dispatch is not usually classified as a conditional construct, it is another way to select between alternatives at runtime. Conditional statements are the checkpoints in the programme that determines behaviour according to situation.

The history of programming languages spans from documentation of early mechanical computers to modern tools for software development. Early programming languages were highly specialized, relying on mathematical notation and similarly obscure syntax. Throughout the 20th century, research in compiler theory led to the creation of high-level programming languages, which use a more accessible syntax to communicate instructions.

In computer programming, a statement is a syntactic unit of an imperative programming language that expresses some action to be carried out. A program written in such a language is formed by a sequence of one or more statements. A statement may have internal components.

In computer science, the Boolean is a data type that has one of two possible values which is intended to represent the two truth values of logic and Boolean algebra. It is named after George Boole, who first defined an algebraic system of logic in the mid 19th century. The Boolean data type is primarily associated with conditional statements, which allow different actions by changing control flow depending on whether a programmer-specified Boolean condition evaluates to true or false. It is a special case of a more general logical data type—logic does not always need to be Boolean.

In computer science, a relational operator is a programming language construct or operator that tests or defines some kind of relation between two entities. These include numerical equality and inequalities.

In computer programming, a nested function is a named function that is defined within another, enclosing, block and is lexically scoped within the enclosing block – meaning it is only callable by name within the body of the enclosing block and can use identifiers declared in outer blocks, including outer functions. The enclosing block is typically, but not always, another function.

A foreign function interface (FFI) is a mechanism by which a program written in one programming language can call routines or make use of services written or compiled in another one. An FFI is often used in contexts where calls are made into binary dynamic-link library.

This comparison of programming languages compares the features of language syntax (format) for over 50 computer programming languages.

This article compares a large number of programming languages by tabulating their data types, their expression, statement, and declaration syntax, and some common operating-system interfaces.

References

↑ As of May 2006 Diarmuid Pigott's Encyclopedia of Computer Languages Archived 2011-02-20 at the Wayback Machine hosted at Murdoch University, Australia lists 8512 computer languages.
↑ Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3, 3.9 Tagged Types and Type Extensions
↑ Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3, Section 6: Subprograms
↑ Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3, Section 12: Generic Units
↑ Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3, Section 9: Tasks and Synchronization
↑ Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3 Annex E: Distributed Systems
↑ "Vak.ru" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-03-30. Retrieved 2008-08-09.
↑ ISO 1538:1984
↑ "Vak.ru" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-03-24. Retrieved 2008-08-09.
↑ IEEE 694-1985
↑ Objects - Definition & Usage
↑ "Ballerina Language Specification" (PDF). WSO2. 2018-05-01. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-05-04. Retrieved 2018-05-03.
1 2 3 POSIX.2, Shell and Utilities, Command Interpreter (IEEE Std 1003.2-1992.)
↑ JSR 274
↑ bell-labs.com
↑ ANSI C89, ISO/IEC 9899:1990, 1999, 2011, 2018
↑ ISO/IEC 14882:1998, 2003, 2011, 2014, 2017, 2020
↑ Codeproject.com: Functional Programming in C# 3.0 using Lambda Expression
↑ ECMA-334; ISO/IEC 23270:2006
↑ Softvelocity.com
↑ "Crystal". GitHub . 2 November 2021.
↑ "Crystal Generics". crystal-lang.org. 13 April 2024.
↑ "Concurrency - Crystal". crystal-lang.org. Retrieved 2024-04-02.
↑ Basic Eiffel language mechanisms
↑ Closure (computer programming)
↑ ECMA-367; ISO/IEC 25436:2006
↑ The Go Programming Language (FAQ)
↑ JSR 241
↑ "The Haskell 2010 Language Report" . Retrieved 2011-12-07. Most Haskell implementations extend the Haskell 2010 standard.
↑ "M8 is out!". 2 July 2014. As a first peek into the future reflective capabilities of Kotlin, you can now access properties as first-class objects in Kotlin
↑ Halcyon (Inworldz) and Open Sims propose compatible implementations with additional functions.
↑ Lua does not have explicit "object" type (more general type of "table" is used for object definition), but does have explicit syntax for object method calling
↑ Version releases are accompanied with a definitive Lua Reference Manual showing full syntax and semantics; a reference implementation, and a test suite. These are used to generate other Lua VM implementations and compilers such as Kahlua and LLVM-Lua.
↑ ISO/IEC 10514-1:1996
↑ ISO 7185
↑ PHP Manual, Chapter 19. Classes and Objects (PHP 5),
↑ PHP Manual, Chapter 17. Functions
↑ "PostScript Language Reference Manual" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-02-18. Retrieved 2017-02-18.
↑ Is Rust an Object-Oriented Programming Language?
↑ Klabnik, Steve; Nichols, Carol. "Macros". The Rust Programming Language.
↑ R³RS, R⁴RS, R⁵RS, R⁶RS, R⁷RS Small Edition
↑ R⁰RS, R¹RS, R²RS
↑ SMLNJ.org
↑ "STD.stdio - D Programming Language".
↑ Scala runs on the Java Virtual Machine from which it inherits the runtime exception handling.
1 2 gcc can warn on unchecked errno. Newer versions of Visual Studio usually throw exceptions on failed I/O when using stdio.
↑ Considerable error checking can be enabled optionally, but by default Perl is not failsafe.
↑ set -e enables termination if any unchecked exit status is nonzero.
↑ Data from McConnell, Steve (30 November 2009). Code Complete. Microsoft Press. p. 100. ISBN 9780735636972. The Statements ratio column "shows typical ratios of source statements in several high-level languages to the equivalent code in C. A higher ratio means that each line of code in the language listed accomplishes more than does each line of code in C.
↑ The ratio of line count tests won by each language to the number won by C when using the Compare to feature at McLoone, Jon (November 14, 2012). "Code Length Measured in 14 Languages". Archived from the original on 2012-11-19. C gcc was used for C, C++ g++ was used for C++, FORTRAN G95 was used for FORTRAN, Java JDK Server was used for Java, and Smalltalk GST was used for Smalltalk.
↑ Felleisen, Matthias. On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages. ESOP '90 3rd European Symposium on Programming. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.51.4656 .
↑ "How programs are measured". Computer Language Benchmarks Game. Retrieved 2018-05-29.
↑ Mandelbrot, Benoit B. (1982). The fractal geometry of nature (Revised ed.). San Francisco. ISBN 0-7167-1186-9. OCLC 7876824.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
↑ "Mandelbrot". Computer Language Benchmarks Game. Retrieved 2021-07-09.
↑ "The Ultimate Benchmark". The Computer Language Benchmarks Game. Retrieved 2018-05-29.
↑ Valentine, S. H. (November 1974). "Comparative Notes on Algol 68 and PL/I". The Computer Journal. 17 (4): 325–331. doi: 10.1093/comjnl/17.4.325 .
↑ "Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam" (PDF).

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