Comparison of programming languages

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.

There are thousands of programming languages[1] and new ones are created every year. Few languages ever become sufficiently popular that they are used by more than a few people, but professional programmers may use dozens of languages in a career.

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

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

Type systems

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Failsafe I/O and system calls

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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

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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

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Barplot of log-time to produce a 1600² Mandelbrot[53] as reported in The Benchmarks Game[54]

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

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  • 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 & CDennis 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

See also

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To display all pages, subcategories and images click on the "►":

References

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  1. ^ 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.
  2. ^ Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3, 3.9 Tagged Types and Type Extensions
  3. ^ Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3, Section 6: Subprograms
  4. ^ Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3, Section 12: Generic Units
  5. ^ Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3, Section 9: Tasks and Synchronization
  6. ^ Ada Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:2005(E) Ed. 3 Annex E: Distributed Systems
  7. ^ "Vak.ru" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-03-30. Retrieved 2008-08-09.
  8. ^ ISO 1538:1984
  9. ^ "Vak.ru" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-03-24. Retrieved 2008-08-09.
  10. ^ IEEE 694-1985
  11. ^ Objects - Definition & Usage
  12. ^ "Ballerina Language Specification" (PDF). WSO2. 2018-05-01. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-05-04. Retrieved 2018-05-03.
  13. ^ a b c POSIX.2, Shell and Utilities, Command Interpreter (IEEE Std 1003.2-1992.)
  14. ^ JSR 274
  15. ^ bell-labs.com
  16. ^ ANSI C89, ISO/IEC 9899:1990, 1999, 2011, 2018
  17. ^ ISO/IEC 14882:1998, 2003, 2011, 2014, 2017, 2020
  18. ^ Codeproject.com: Functional Programming in C# 3.0 using Lambda Expression
  19. ^ ECMA-334; ISO/IEC 23270:2006
  20. ^ Softvelocity.com
  21. ^ "Crystal". GitHub. 2 November 2021.
  22. ^ "Crystal Generics". crystal-lang.org. 13 April 2024.
  23. ^ "Concurrency - Crystal". crystal-lang.org. Retrieved 2024-04-02.
  24. ^ Basic Eiffel language mechanisms
  25. ^ Closure (computer programming)
  26. ^ ECMA-367; ISO/IEC 25436:2006
  27. ^ The Go Programming Language (FAQ)
  28. ^ JSR 241
  29. ^ "The Haskell 2010 Language Report". Retrieved 2011-12-07. Most Haskell implementations extend the Haskell 2010 standard.
  30. ^ "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
  31. ^ Halcyon (Inworldz) and Open Sims propose compatible implementations with additional functions.
  32. ^ 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
  33. ^ 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.
  34. ^ ISO/IEC 10514-1:1996
  35. ^ ISO 7185
  36. ^ PHP Manual, Chapter 19. Classes and Objects (PHP 5),
  37. ^ PHP Manual, Chapter 17. Functions
  38. ^ "PostScript Language Reference Manual" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-02-18. Retrieved 2017-02-18.
  39. ^ Is Rust an Object-Oriented Programming Language?
  40. ^ Klabnik, Steve; Nichols, Carol. "Macros". The Rust Programming Language.
  41. ^ R3RS, R4RS, R5RS, R6RS, R7RS Small Edition
  42. ^ R0RS, R1RS, R2RS
  43. ^ SMLNJ.org
  44. ^ "STD.stdio - D Programming Language".
  45. ^ Scala runs on the Java Virtual Machine from which it inherits the runtime exception handling.
  46. ^ a b gcc can warn on unchecked errno. Newer versions of Visual Studio usually throw exceptions on failed I/O when using stdio.
  47. ^ Considerable error checking can be enabled optionally, but by default Perl is not failsafe.
  48. ^ set -e enables termination if any unchecked exit status is nonzero.
  49. ^ 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.
  50. ^ 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.
  51. ^ Felleisen, Matthias. On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages. ESOP '90 3rd European Symposium on Programming. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.51.4656.
  52. ^ "How programs are measured". Computer Language Benchmarks Game. Retrieved 2018-05-29.
  53. ^ 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)
  54. ^ "Mandelbrot". Computer Language Benchmarks Game. Retrieved 2021-07-09.
  55. ^ "The Ultimate Benchmark". The Computer Language Benchmarks Game. Retrieved 2018-05-29.
  56. ^ 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.
  57. ^ "Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam" (PDF).

Further reading

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