Concept
Function (computer programming)
Related concepts (126)
ALGOL 58
ALGOL 58, originally named IAL, is one of the family of ALGOL computer programming languages. It was an early compromise design soon superseded by ALGOL 60. According to John Backus The Zurich ACM-GAMM Conference had two principal motives in proposing the IAL: (a) To provide a means of communicating numerical methods and other procedures between people, and (b) To provide a means of realizing a stated process on a variety of machines...
Duplicate code
In computer programming, duplicate code is a sequence of source code that occurs more than once, either within a program or across different programs owned or maintained by the same entity. Duplicate code is generally considered undesirable for a number of reasons. A minimum requirement is usually applied to the quantity of code that must appear in a sequence for it to be considered duplicate rather than coincidentally similar.
Runtime system
In computer programming, a runtime system or runtime environment is a sub-system that exists both in the computer where a program is created, as well as in the computers where the program is intended to be run. The name comes from the compile time and runtime division from compiled languages, which similarly distinguishes the computer processes involved in the creation of a program (compilation) and its execution in the target machine (the run time). Most programming languages have some form of runtime system that provides an environment in which programs run.
Data type
In computer science and computer programming, a data type (or simply type) is a collection or grouping of data values, usually specified by a set of possible values, a set of allowed operations on these values, and/or a representation of these values as machine types. A data type specification in a program constrains the possible values that an expression, such as a variable or a function call, might take. On literal data, it tells the compiler or interpreter how the programmer intends to use the data.
Return statement
In computer programming, a return statement causes execution to leave the current subroutine and resume at the point in the code immediately after the instruction which called the subroutine, known as its return address. The return address is saved by the calling routine, today usually on the process's call stack or in a register. Return statements in many programming languages allow a function to specify a return value to be passed back to the code that called the function.
High-level programming language
In computer science, a high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. In contrast to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language elements, be easier to use, or may automate (or even hide entirely) significant areas of computing systems (e.g. memory management), making the process of developing a program simpler and more understandable than when using a lower-level language. The amount of abstraction provided defines how "high-level" a programming language is.
Opaque data type
In computer science, an opaque data type is a data type whose concrete data structure is not defined in an interface. This enforces information hiding, since its values can only be manipulated by calling subroutines that have access to the missing information. The concrete representation of the type is hidden from its users, and the visible implementation is incomplete. A data type whose representation is visible is called transparent. Opaque data types are frequently used to implement abstract data types.
Exception handling
In computing and computer programming, exception handling is the process of responding to the occurrence of exceptions – anomalous or exceptional conditions requiring special processing – during the execution of a program. In general, an exception breaks the normal flow of execution and executes a pre-registered exception handler; the details of how this is done depend on whether it is a hardware or software exception and how the software exception is implemented.
Self-modifying code
In computer science, self-modifying code (SMC or SMoC) is code that alters its own instructions while it is executing – usually to reduce the instruction path length and improve performance or simply to reduce otherwise repetitively similar code, thus simplifying maintenance. The term is usually only applied to code where the self-modification is intentional, not in situations where code accidentally modifies itself due to an error such as a buffer overflow.
Side effect (computer science)
In computer science, an operation, function or expression is said to have a side effect if it modifies some state variable value(s) outside its local environment, which is to say if it has any observable effect other than its primary effect of returning a value to the invoker of the operation. Example side effects include modifying a non-local variable, modifying a static local variable, modifying a mutable argument passed by reference, performing I/O or calling other functions with side-effects.