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Key Traits of Effective Programming Languages

The document discusses characteristics of a good programming language including simplicity, naturalness for the application area, allowing for abstraction, efficiency in execution and memory usage, supporting structured programming, and compactness in expressing operations concisely. A good language should provide clear and unified concepts that are easy to learn, have natural syntax for the problem domain, enable abstraction to simplify programming, and efficiently execute programs using less memory and space. It also stresses the importance of structured programming support, readability, and compact expression of operations without losing clarity.

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315 views7 pages

Key Traits of Effective Programming Languages

The document discusses characteristics of a good programming language including simplicity, naturalness for the application area, allowing for abstraction, efficiency in execution and memory usage, supporting structured programming, and compactness in expressing operations concisely. A good language should provide clear and unified concepts that are easy to learn, have natural syntax for the problem domain, enable abstraction to simplify programming, and efficiently execute programs using less memory and space. It also stresses the importance of structured programming support, readability, and compact expression of operations without losing clarity.

Uploaded by

ruksharyashmin
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Characteristics of a Good

Programming Language
DR. DEBARPITA SANTRA
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR I
AMITY INSTITUTE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY KOLKATA
AMITY UNIVERSITY KOLKATA
Simplicity

 A good programming language must be simple and easy to learn and use.
 It should provide a programmer with a clear, simple, and unified set of concepts that can
be grasped easily.
 The overall simplicity of a programming language strongly affects the readability of the
programs written in that language, and programs that are easier to read and understand
are easier to maintain.
 It is also easy to develop and implement a compiler or an interpreter for a simple
programming language.
 However, the power needed for the language should not be sacrificed for simplicity. For
example, BASIC is liked by many programmers because of its simplicity.
Naturalness

 A good language should be natural for the application area for which it is designed.
 That is, it should provide appropriate operators, data structure, control structures, and a
natural syntax to facilitate programmers to code their problems easily and efficiently.
 FORTAN and COBOL are good examples of languages possessing high degree of
naturalness in scientific and business application areas, respectively.
Abstraction

 Abstraction means the ability to define and then use complicated structures or operations in
ways that allow many of the details to be ignored.
 The degree of abstraction allowed by a programming language directly affects its ease of
programming.
 For example, object- oriented languages support high degree of abstraction. Hence, writing
programs in object- oriented languages is much easier.
Efficiency

 Programs written in a good programming language are translated into machine code
efficiently, are executed efficiently, and acquire relatively less space in memory.
 That is, a good programming language is supposed with a good language translator (a
compiler or an interpreter) that gives due consideration to space and time efficiency.
Structured Programming Support

 A good programming language should have necessary features to allow programmers to


write their programs based on the concepts of structured programming.
 This property greatly affects the ease with which a program may be written, tested, and
maintained.
 Moreover, it forces a programmer to look at a problem in a logical way so that fewer
errors are created while writing a program for the problem.
Compactness

 In a good programming language, programmers should be able to express the intended


operations concisely without losing readability. Programmers generally do not like a
verbose language because they need to write too much.
 Many programmers dislike COBOL because it is verbose in nature (lacks compactness).

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