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 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. TOC The following table compares general and technical information for a selection of commonly used programming languages. See the individual languages' articles for further information. Comparison of programming languages by type system 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), 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.