315 articles
Mixin
A mixin is an abstract subclass in object-oriented programming that is not instantiated alone but applied to superclasses, formalized by Gilad Bracha and William Cook at OOPSLA 1990.
ML (programming language)
ML is a family of strictly typed functional programming languages created as the Meta Language at the University of Edinburgh in the 1970s, best known through Standard ML.
Modelica
Modelica is a free, object-oriented language for modeling large physical and cyber-physical systems through equations rather than assignment statements, standardized by the Modelica Association since 2000.
Modula-2
Modula-2 is a statically typed procedural programming language designed by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich in 1978 as a successor to Pascal, intended for systems programming.
Modula-3
Modula-3 is a systems programming language designed at DEC SRC and Olivetti Research California, first published in 1988, supporting interfaces, objects, generics, threads, and garbage collection while isolating unsafe code.
Modular programming
Modular programming: software design technique decomposing programs into independent, interchangeable modules with well-defined interfaces; key ideas information hiding (Parnas 1972), 1968 Constantine symposium, Meyer's modularity rules, module-call overhead costs.
Modules (C++)
Modules are a C++20 language feature replacing header files, exporting declarations compiled into binary form and loaded with import; they were merged into the C++20 draft in 2019.
Multiple dispatch
Multiple dispatch is a programming language mechanism that selects which method runs based on the runtime types of more than one argument, as in Julia and CLOS.
Multiple inheritance
Multiple inheritance is the ability of a class to have more than one base class, so it inherits members from several direct parents, with the diamond problem as its best-known difficulty.
MUMPS
MUMPS, also known as M, is a programming language with a built-in persistent database, created at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in 1966 and 1967 for hospital information systems.
Namespace
A namespace is a context for identifiers in a program that groups names so each identifier uniquely identifies an entity, preventing collisions between independently written code.
Non-English-based programming languages
Non-English-based programming languages express keywords, syntax, numerals, or error messages in natural languages other than English; they have existed since the 1960s, and studies show localized languages help novices learn faster.
Null semantics
Null semantics are the rules SQL uses to handle null, a placeholder for unknown or missing values, evaluating comparisons under three-valued logic whose truth values are true, false, and unknown.
Oberon (programming language)
Oberon is a general-purpose programming language created by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zürich, defined in 1988 as a descendant of Pascal and Modula-2, known for type extension.
Object (computer science)
In computer science, an object is a region of storage combining state, behavior, and identity, the core concept of object-oriented programming, first introduced by the 1967 language Simula 67.
Object Pascal
Object Pascal is a family of object-oriented extensions of Pascal, created at Apple in 1985 by Larry Tesler and Niklaus Wirth and best known today through Embarcadero Delphi.
Object-oriented programming
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming style in which software is built from objects that bundle state with operations, using techniques like encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism.
Objective-C
Objective-C, also known as ObjC, is an object-oriented programming language extending C with Smalltalk-style messaging, created by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s.
OCaml
OCaml, formerly Objective Caml, is a statically typed ML-family programming language created in 1996 at INRIA in France, combining functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming with automatic type inference.
Occam (programming language)
Occam is a concurrent programming language designed by David May at INMOS for the transputer, based on Hoare's CSP, in which processes communicate over synchronized one-way channels.
Operational semantics
Operational semantics is a formal method of defining programming languages by inference rules describing how programs execute on an abstract machine, introduced by Gordon Plotkin in 1981.
Operator (computer programming)
In computer programming, an operator is a symbol or reserved word that performs a defined operation on one or more operands, such as the + in 3 + 4.
Operator overloading
Operator overloading is a programming language feature letting programmers define standard operators like + for their own types, central to C++, C#, Python, and Rust.
Ownership (Rust)
Ownership is Rust's compile-time rules for managing memory, where each value has exactly one owner and is freed when that owner goes out of scope, letting Rust guarantee memory safety without a garbage collector.
Ownership type
An ownership type is a type annotation recording which object or context owns an object, so a compiler can statically restrict how references to it are shared, with uses in concurrency and memory management.
Parameter (computer programming)
In computer programming, a parameter is a variable named in a function declaration that is initialized with a supplied value, called an argument, when the function is invoked.
Parametricity
Parametricity is the property of polymorphic functions in type theory that they behave uniformly across type instantiations: such a function cannot inspect its type arguments, an idea formalized relationally by Reynolds in 1983.
Pascal (programming language)
Pascal, also known as the Pascal language, is a strongly typed procedural programming language designed by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich, first implemented in 1970 and standardized as ISO 7185.
Pattern matching
Pattern matching is a programming-language construct that tests a value against a described shape, called a pattern, binding variables to its parts; it generalizes the switch statement.
Perl
Perl is a general-purpose programming language created by Larry Wall and first released in 1987, best known for powerful text processing and its Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN).