Elements in Programming

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Syntax:

Parse tree of Python code with inset tokenization
Parse tree of Python code with inset tokenization
Syntax highlighting is often used to aid programmers in the recognition of elements of source code. The language you see here is Python
Syntax highlighting is often used to aid programmers in the recognition of elements of source code. The language you see here is Python

A programming language's surface form is known as its syntax. Most programming languages are purely textual; they use sequences of text including words, numbers, and punctuation, much like written natural languages. On the other hand, there are some programming languages which are more graphical in nature, using spatial relationships between symbols to specify a program.

The syntax of a language describes the possible combinations of symbols that form a syntactically correct program. The meaning given to a combination of symbols is handled by semantics. Since most languages are textual, this article discusses textual syntax.

Programming language syntax is usually defined using a combination of regular expressions (for lexical structure) and Backus-Naur Form (for grammatical structure). Below is a simple grammar, based on Lisp:

expression ::= atom | list
atom ::= number | symbol
number ::= [+-]?['0'-'9']+
symbol ::= ['A'-'Z''a'-'z'].*
list ::= '(' expression* ')'

This grammar specifies the following:

* an expression is either an atom or a list;
* an atom is either a number or a symbol;
* a number is an unbroken sequence of one or more decimal digits, optionally preceded by a plus or minus sign;
* a symbol is a letter followed by zero or more of any characters (excluding whitespace); and
* a list is a matched pair of parentheses, with zero or more expressions inside it.

The following are examples of well-formed token sequences in this grammar: '12345', '()', '(a b c232 (1))'

Not all syntactically correct programs are semantically correct. Many syntactically correct programs are nonetheless ill-formed, per the language's rules; and may (depending on the language specification and the soundness of the implementation) result in an error on translation or execution. In some cases, such programs may exhibit undefined behavior. Even when a program is well-defined within a language, it may still have a meaning that is not intended by the person who wrote it.

Using natural language as an example, it may not be possible to assign a meaning to a grammatically correct sentence or the sentence may be false:

* "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." is grammatically well-formed but has no generally accepted meaning.
* "John is a married bachelor." is grammatically well-formed but expresses a meaning that cannot be true.

The following C language fragment is syntactically correct, but performs an operation that is not semantically defined (because p is a null pointer, the operations p->real and p->im have no meaning):

complex *p = NULL;
complex abs_p = sqrt (p->real * p->real + p->im * p->im);

The grammar needed to specify a programming language can be classified by its position in the Chomsky hierarchy. The syntax of most programming languages can be specified using a Type-2 grammar, ie, they are context-free grammars.[11]

Type system

For more details on this topic, see Type system.
For more details on this topic, see Type safety.

A type system defines how a programming language classifies values and expressions into types, how it can manipulate those types and how they interact. This generally includes a description of the data structures that can be constructed in the language. The design and study of type systems using formal mathematics is known as type theory.

Internally, all data in modern digital computers are stored simply as zeros or ones (binary). The data typically represent information in the real world such as names, bank accounts and measurements, so the low-level binary data are organized by programming languages into these high-level concepts as data types. There are also more abstract types whose purpose is just to warn the programmer about semantically meaningless statements or verify safety properties of programs.

Most languages can be classified with respect to their type systems, though some such as Visual Basic allow the programmer to choose the system employed.

Typed vs untyped languages

A language is typed if operations defined for one data type cannot be performed on values of another data type.[12] For example, "this text between the quotes" is a string. In most programming languages, dividing a number by a string has no meaning. Most modern programming languages will therefore reject any program attempting to perform such an operation. In some languages, the meaningless operation will be detected when the program is compiled ("static" type checking), and rejected by the compiler, while in others, it will be detected when the program is run ("dynamic" type checking), resulting in a runtime exception.

A special case of typed languages are the single-type languages. These are often scripting or markup languages, such as Rexx or SGML, and have only one data type — most commonly character strings which are used for both symbolic and numeric data.

In contrast, an untyped language, such as most assembly languages, allows any operation to be performed on any data, which are generally considered to be sequences of bits of various lengths.[12] High-level languages which are untyped include BCPL and some varieties of Forth.

In practice, while few languages are considered typed from the point of view of type theory (verifying or rejecting all operations), most modern languages offer a degree of typing.[12] Many production languages provide means to bypass or subvert the type system.

Static vs dynamic typing

In static typing all expressions have their types determined prior to the program being run (typically at compile-time). For example, 1 and (2+2) are integer expressions; they cannot be passed to a function that expects a string, or stored in a variable that is defined to hold dates.[12]

Statically-typed languages can be manifestly typed or type-inferred. In the first case, the programmer must explicitly write types at certain textual positions (for example, at variable declarations). In the second case, the compiler infers the types of expressions and declarations based on context. Most mainstream statically-typed languages, such as C++ and Java, are manifestly typed. Complete type inference has traditionally been associated with less mainstream languages, such as Haskell and ML. However, many manifestly typed languages support partial type inference; for example, Java and C# both infer types in certain limited cases.[13] Dynamic typing, also called latent typing, determines the type-safety of operations at runtime; in other words, types are associated with runtime values rather than textual expressions.[12] As with type-inferred languages, dynamically typed languages do not require the programmer to write explicit type annotations on expressions. Among other things, this may permit a single variable to refer to values of different types at different points in the program execution. However, type errors cannot be automatically detected until a piece of code is actually executed, making debugging more difficult. Ruby, Lisp, JavaScript, and Python are dynamically typed.

Weak and strong typing

Weak typing allows a value of one type to be treated as another, for example treating a string as a number.[12] This can occasionally be useful, but it can also allow some kinds of program faults to go undetected at compile time.

Strong typing prevents the above. Attempting to mix types raises an error.[12] Strongly-typed languages are often termed type-safe or safe, type safety can prevent particular kinds of program faults occurring (because constructs containing them are flagged at compile time).

An alternative definition for "weakly typed" refers to languages, such as Perl, JavaScript, and C++ which permit a large number of implicit type conversions; Perl in particular can be characterized as a dynamically typed programming language in which type checking can take place at runtime. See type system. This capability is often useful, but occasionally dangerous; as it would permit operations whose objects can change type on demand.

Strong and static are generally considered orthogonal concepts, but usage in the literature differs. Some use the term strongly typed to mean strongly, statically typed, or, even more confusingly, to mean simply statically typed. Thus C has been called both strongly typed and weakly, statically typed.[14][15].

Execution semantics

Once data has been specified, the machine must be instructed to perform operations on the data. The execution semantics of a language defines how and when the various constructs of a language should produce a program behavior.

For example, the semantics may define the strategy by which expressions are evaluated to values, or the manner in which control structures conditionally execute statements.

Core library

For more details on this topic, see Standard library.

Most programming languages have an associated core library (sometimes known as the 'Standard library', especially if it is included as part of the published language standard), which is conventionally made available by all implementations of the language. Core libraries typically include definitions for commonly used algorithms, data structures, and mechanisms for input and output.

A language's core library is often treated as part of the language by its users, although the designers may have treated it as a separate entity. Many language specifications define a core that must be made available in all implementations, and in the case of standardized languages this core library may be required. The line between a language and its core library therefore differs from language to language. Indeed, some languages are designed so that the meanings of certain syntactic constructs cannot even be described without referring to the core library. For example, in Java, a string literal is defined as an instance of the java.lang.String class; similarly, in Smalltalk, an anonymous function expression (a "block") constructs an instance of the library's BlockContext class. Conversely, Scheme contains multiple coherent subsets that suffice to construct the rest of the language as library macros, and so the language designers do not even bother to say which portions of the language must be implemented as language constructs, and which must be implemented as parts of a library.