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→Describing a programming language: more detail
The meaning or [[semantics]] of any particular construct in a programming language is most commonly described in fairly precise English. Several unsuccessful attempts have been made to find a formal way of describing the semantics.
The meaning or [[semantics]] of any particular construct in a programming language is most commonly described in fairly precise English. Several unsuccessful attempts have been made to find a formal way of describing the semantics.
The more important programming languages have an internationally-agreed official standard (ISO is the international standards organisation, ANSI is the standards body in the United States). In theory, programs which conform to the relevant standard should be usable on most types of computer; this works in practice most of the time, provided that the programmers have been careful to avoid machine-dependencies.
The more important programming languages have an internationally-agreed official standard (ISO is the international standards organisation, ANSI is the standards body in the United States). In theory, programs which conform to the relevant standard should be usable on most types of computer; this works in practice most of the time, provided that the programmers have been careful to avoid machine-dependencies. Such agreed standards are usually revised every 5 to 15 years, often with new features being added, and sometimes with old features being either removed or marked as obsolete.
Very few programmers learn a programming language directly from the formal definition, which exists primarily as a reference which can be consulted in cases of doubt. There are usually plenty of books and training courses for the more common programming languages.
Very few programmers learn a programming language directly from the formal definition, which exists primarily as a reference which can be consulted in cases of doubt. There are usually plenty of books and training courses for the more common programming languages.
==The art of programming==
The act of writing a computer program using a programming language is called [[programming]]. While there are many guidelines, there are no rules which are guaranteed to produce a correct and usable program, so programming is very much an art or skill rather than a science. Furthermore, a programmer must pay meticulous attention to detail: a moderately large program of say 150,000 instructions must be completely free of punctuation errors, grammatical errors, and spelling mistakes, and must also be largely free of logical errors (as a size comparison, a 400-page paperback book contains about 16,000 lines - 1/10th the size).
Various studies have found that programmers with a comparable amount of experience may differ in skill levels by a factor of 10 or more.
==About programming languages==
==About programming languages==