Comment (computer programming)In computer programming, a comment is a programmer-readable explanation or annotation in the source code of a computer program. They are added with the purpose of making the source code easier for humans to understand, and are generally ignored by compilers and interpreters. The syntax of comments in various programming languages varies considerably. Comments are sometimes also processed in various ways to generate documentation external to the source code itself by documentation generators, or used for integration with source code management systems and other kinds of external programming tools.
Comparison of programming languages (syntax)This comparison of programming languages compares the features of language syntax (format) for over 50 computer programming languages. Programming language expressions can be broadly classified into four syntax structures: prefix notation Lisp (* (+ 2 3) (expt 4 5)) infix notation Fortran (2 + 3) * (4 ** 5) suffix, postfix, or Reverse Polish notation Forth 2 3 + 4 5 ** * math-like notation TUTOR (2 + 3)(45) $$ note implicit multiply operator When a programming languages has statements, they typically have conventions for: statement separators; statement terminators; and line continuation A statement separator demarcates the boundary between two separate statements.
JSONJSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ˈdʒeɪsən; also ˈdʒeɪˌsɒn) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other serializable values). It is a common data format with diverse uses in electronic data interchange, including that of web applications with servers. JSON is a language-independent data format. It was derived from JavaScript, but many modern programming languages include code to generate and parse JSON-format data.
SerializationIn computing, serialization (or serialisation) is the process of translating a data structure or object state into a format that can be stored (e.g. in secondary storage devices, data buffers in primary storage devices) or transmitted (e.g. data streams over computer networks) and reconstructed later (possibly in a different computer environment). When the resulting series of bits is reread according to the serialization format, it can be used to create a semantically identical clone of the original object.
Lexical analysisLexical tokenization is conversion of a text into (semantically or syntactically) meaningful lexical tokens belonging to categories defined by a "lexer" program. In case of a natural language, those categories include nouns, verbs, adjectives, punctuations etc. In case of a programming language, the categories include identifiers, operators, grouping symbols and data types. Lexical tokenization is not the same process as the probabilistic tokenization, used for large language model's data preprocessing, that encode text into numerical tokens, using byte pair encoding.
String literalA string literal or anonymous string is a literal for a string value in the source code of a computer program. Modern programming languages commonly use a quoted sequence of characters, formally "bracketed delimiters", as in x = "foo", where "foo" is a string literal with value foo. Methods such as escape sequences can be used to avoid the problem of delimiter collision (issues with brackets) and allow the delimiters to be embedded in a string. There are many alternate notations for specifying string literals especially in complicated cases.
Scope (computer science)In computer programming, the scope of a name binding (an association of a name to an entity, such as a variable) is the part of a program where the name binding is valid; that is, where the name can be used to refer to the entity. In other parts of the program, the name may refer to a different entity (it may have a different binding), or to nothing at all (it may be unbound). Scope helps prevent name collisions by allowing the same name to refer to different objects – as long as the names have separate scopes.
