Technology Case

Chapter 1

1. Why is it useful for a programmer to have some background in language design, even though he or she may never actually design a programming language?

Understanding the design of a language will inevitably make you a better programmer. Also, knowing the design and makeup of a few different languages will assist you in deciding which programming language would be better suited for the project. This can help with those 'big-picture' decisions that can affect "reliability and cost of execution" (pg.25).

2. How can knowledge of programming language characteristics benefit the whole computing community?

You need to be familiar with more than 1 or 2 languages if you have hopes of being a well rounded programmer. Having knowledge of other programming languages not only increases your abilities, it also increases your vocabulary and therefore your ability to understand what language would be better to use for the problem at hand. And, if the ones in control that choose languages are better informed, maybe the stronger languages would edge out the ones that are obsolete.

7. What is the disadvantage of having too many features in a language?

Having too many features in a language can be detrimental to clear programming practices. If there are too many features then the basic simplicity of reading a program could be lost. The simpler and more user-friendly programming languages allow for a smoother creation process, especially if there are many people working on the same code.

22. What are the three fundamental features of an object-oriented programming language?

The three fundamental features of an object-oriented programming are encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism. Encapsulation promotes the concept of information hiding, which is useful because it protects information from being changed or altered by other parts of a program. Inheritance allows one to reuse existing software so it allows significant improvement in productivity. Polymorphism allows data types and function to belong to more generic classes thus allowing for different data types to be processed in a uniform manner.

30. What are the advantages in implementing a language with a pure interpreter?

One of the advantages of implementing a language with a pure interpreter is easy implementation of many source-level debugging operations, because all run-time errors can refer to the source-level units. An example of this is an array index is found to be out of rang...