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In programming languages, a closure, also lexical closure or function closure, is a technique for implementing lexically scoped name binding in a language with first-class functions. Operationally, a closure is a record storing a function together with an environment. The environment is a mapping associating each free variable of the function with the value or reference to which the name was bound when the closure was created. Unlike a plain function, a closure allows the function to access those captured variables through the closure's copies of their values or references, even when the function is invoked outside their scope.
In computer programming, the interpreter pattern is a design pattern that specifies how to evaluate sentences in a language. The basic idea is to have a class for each symbol in a specialized computer language. The syntax tree of a sentence in the language is an instance of the composite pattern and is used to evaluate (interpret) the sentence for a client. See also Composite pattern.
In object-oriented and functional programming, an immutable object is an object whose state cannot be modified after it is created. This is in contrast to a mutable object, which can be modified after it is created. In some cases, an object is considered immutable even if some internally used attributes change, but the object's state appears unchanging from an external point of view. For example, an object that uses memoization to cache the results of expensive computations could still be considered an immutable object.
Backtracking is a class of algorithms for finding solutions to some computational problems, notably constraint satisfaction problems, that incrementally builds candidates to the solutions, and abandons a candidate ("backtracks") as soon as it determines that the candidate cannot possibly be completed to a valid solution.
In mathematics and computer science, a higher-order function (HOF) is a function that does at least one of the following:
In computer programming, an assignment statement sets and/or re-sets the value stored in the storage location(s) denoted by a variable name; in other words, it copies a value into the variable. In most imperative programming languages, the assignment statement is a fundamental construct.
In computer science, a tagged union, also called a variant, variant record, choice type, discriminated union, disjoint union, sum type or coproduct, is a data structure used to hold a value that could take on several different, but fixed, types. Only one of the types can be in use at any one time, and a tag field explicitly indicates which one is in use. It can be thought of as a type that has several "cases", each of which should be handled correctly when that type is manipulated. This is critical in defining recursive datatypes, in which some component of a value may have the same type as the value itself, for example in defining a type for representing trees, where it is necessary to distinguish multi-node subtrees and leaves. Like ordinary unions, tagged unions can save storage by overlapping storage areas for each type, since only one is in use at a time.
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.
In computer programming, a function object is a construct allowing an object to be invoked or called as if it were an ordinary function, usually with the same syntax. Function objects are often called functors.
In computer programming, the ternary conditional operator is a ternary operator that is part of the syntax for basic conditional expressions in several programming languages. It is commonly referred to as the conditional operator, ternary if, or inline if. An expression a ? b : c evaluates to b if the value of a is true, and otherwise to c. One can read it aloud as "if a then b otherwise c". The form a ? b : c is by far and large the most common, but alternative syntaxes do exist; for example, Raku uses the syntax a ?? b !! c to avoid confusion with the infix operators ? and !, whereas in Visual Basic .NET, it instead takes the form If(a, b, c).
In computer science, a tail call is a subroutine call performed as the final action of a procedure. If the target of a tail is the same subroutine, the subroutine is said to be tail recursive, which is a special case of direct recursion. Tail recursion is particularly useful, and is often easy to optimize in implementations.
The computer programming languages C and Pascal have similar times of origin, influences, and purposes. Both were used to design their own compilers early in their lifetimes. The original Pascal definition appeared in 1969 and a first compiler in 1970. The first version of C appeared in 1972.
In a programming language, an evaluation strategy is a set of rules for evaluating expressions. The term is often used to refer to the more specific notion of a parameter-passing strategy that defines the kind of value that is passed to the function for each parameter and whether to evaluate the parameters of a function call, and if so in what order. The notion of reduction strategy is distinct, although some authors conflate the two terms and the definition of each term is not widely agreed upon.
In computer science, a Boolean expression is an expression used in programming languages that produces a Boolean value when evaluated. A Boolean value is either true or false. A Boolean expression may be composed of a combination of the Boolean constants true or false, Boolean-typed variables, Boolean-valued operators, and Boolean-valued functions.
The syntax of JavaScript is the set of rules that define a correctly structured JavaScript program.
In computer science, recursion is a method of solving a computational problem where the solution depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem. Recursion solves such recursive problems by using functions that call themselves from within their own code. The approach can be applied to many types of problems, and recursion is one of the central ideas of computer science.
The power of recursion evidently lies in the possibility of defining an infinite set of objects by a finite statement. In the same manner, an infinite number of computations can be described by a finite recursive program, even if this program contains no explicit repetitions.
The syntax of the Python programming language is the set of rules that defines how a Python program will be written and interpreted. The Python language has many similarities to Perl, C, and Java. However, there are some definite differences between the languages.
In computer programming, an anonymous function is a function definition that is not bound to an identifier. Anonymous functions are often arguments being passed to higher-order functions or used for constructing the result of a higher-order function that needs to return a function. If the function is only used once, or a limited number of times, an anonymous function may be syntactically lighter than using a named function. Anonymous functions are ubiquitous in functional programming languages and other languages with first-class functions, where they fulfil the same role for the function type as literals do for other data types.
The null coalescing operator is a binary operator that is part of the syntax for a basic conditional expression in several programming languages, including C#, PowerShell as of version 7.0.0, Perl as of version 5.10, Swift, and PHP 7.0.0. While its behavior differs between implementations, the null coalescing operator generally returns the result of its left-most operand if it exists and is not null, and otherwise returns the right-most operand. This behavior allows a default value to be defined for cases where a more specific value is not available.
This article describes the features in Haskell.
References
- ↑ Friedman, Daniel; Wand, Mitchell (April 2008). Essentials of Programming Languages (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262062794.
- ↑ Krishnamurthi, Shriram (November 2012). Programming Languages, Application and Interpretation (2nd ed.). self-published. Retrieved 10 February 2016.