11
Overview of Processing of Some Languages
What you will learn in this chapter
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Some characteristics of Java
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Perl – A popular and powerful scripting language
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Logic Programming language – PROLOG
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An interesting language – FORTH
Key Words
Java, Perl, PROLOG, FORTH
In this chapter, we discuss characteristics of some of the computer programming languages, apart from C or C++. Each language is selected because of certain feature distinguishing that language, from the viewpoint of the language translation and run-time support.
We discuss the following languages:
Java – has grown from its initial offering as a safe language for delivering web-based applets to a general purpose language and associated platform J2EE, which promises several features critical to safe delivery of executables for heterogeneous operating platforms, over the Internet.
Perl – a scripting language, powerful enough to act as a glue language for creating applications from modules. It has a very powerful set of text processing facilities and interfaces quite easily with GUI, web servers, etc. on one hand and provides a simple but adequate object-oriented programming model on the other hand.
PROLOG – PROGramming in LOGic, is a language with a very simple syntax, which hides some powerful declarative programming capabilities. It is a language of choice for Artificial Intelligence problems, especially if they are text based. It is also used as a database language.
FORTH – a rather unusual functional language, with an extremely compact compiler–interpreter. It is especially popular in Robotics, Instrumentation and Control and similar applications not requiring heavy number crunching, but rather quickly modifiable programs.