Article
Article
- Computing & Information Technology
- Programming and software
- Programming language
Programming language
Article By:
Zelkowitz, Marvin V. Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.
Last reviewed:July 2021
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1036/1097-8542.547550
Show previous versions
- Programming languages, published June 2014:Download PDF Get Adobe Acrobat Reader
- Evolution of programming languages
- Machine language
- Assembly language
- High-level language
- Early high-level languages
- Later high-level languages
- Structure of programming languages
- Data declarations
- Data operations
- Execution sequence
- Programming paradigms
- Imperative programs
- Applicative programs
- Declarative programs
- Programming language models
- C
- C++
- Java
- Visual Basic
- Prolog
- Related Primary Literature
- Additional Reading
The notation used to communicate instructions to a computer. A computer executes a sequence of instructions (a program) in order to perform some task. The set of instructions and the order in which they have to be performed is known as an algorithm. The result of expressing the algorithm in a programming language is called a program (Fig. 1). The process of writing the algorithm using a programming language is called programming, and the person doing this is the programmer. See also: Algorithm
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