C, C++, C# to Cracking

Abstract

Foundation concept: Programming language. Definition: Standard, general-purpose programming languages. Overview The evolution of programming languages is a short but very complex story. By the mid 1970s the design of mainstream programming languages had branched in two directions: the general-purpose programming languages and the systems programming languages. General-purpose languages were strongly oriented towards supporting reliable software development; the structure of the languages corresponded closely to the structure of a good top-down design, providing programmers with a built-in framework for safe and verified construction; they were able to provide useful warnings about some of the most common things that could go wrong in a program's design before it is ever run, and they made many of the most troublesome of programmer errors impossible. Unfortunately, what was good for general software development was not always good for low-level, or systems, programming. Implementors of operating systems, compilers, and hardware-monitoring software sometimes have to perform exactly the kind of low-level machine-oriented operations that are so strongly discouraged by the standards of good software development, and programming languages that enforce those standards are made almost unusable for such purposes. As a result, the systems programming language branch of parallel evolution was also constructed. The essential feature of a systems programming language is that a programmer should be able to give any commands that the computer is capable of obeying, and not have to fight against builtin safety features if those commands do not satisfy some safety standard.