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Why did we move from punch cards to programming languages? What does that tell you about the purpose of programming languages?
Punch cards are not as efficient as programming languages in feeding the computer with data. This is due to fact that programmers need to stack cards in order to execute a program. This is, no doubt, a huge waste of time and costly. So, to resolve this issue after the invention of magnetic media, programming languages were born to substitute punch cards with a more efficient way of inputting data and providing instruction to the computer.
- There are hundreds of different programming languages out there. Why do you think we need so many?
There are many reasons for the existence of so many programming languages. These are some of the most significant ones:
- Some languages are more suitable for certain tasks than other languages.
- Some languages are more easily understood than other languages.
- Some languages are more easily learned than other languages.
- What are some drawbacks of a programming language you use? How would you like it to be different? Think of specific examples
The programming language I use is python. It is, compared to C, significantly slower in executing a program. For example: in Regular Expressions, python 3 takes 1.36 seconds whereas C takes 0.8 seconds. Similar cases occur in pidigits, k-nucleotide, binary trees, and many other types of programs.
- If you were going to create a new programming language, how would you start? What do you need to define?
After learning everything that is required to be learned for creating a programming language, I need to take the following steps in order to create a programming language:
- Designing: Before creating the actual language, I need to make certain decisions like whether it should be static or dynamic, what type of programs this language will do best, what would be its syntactical statements, what is its main focus- readability or performance. These are some of the decisions that are required to be taken decisively.
- Building a compiler: This is a crucial part of the programming language. A compiler helps to create any program with that language that is to say that it gives life to the programing language.
- Creating supporting tools for a new programming language: In today's world, it is very useful as well as necessary to have supporting tools for a new programming language.
- Creating a standard library: This helps the newly created language to do printing on the screen, accessing the filesystem, use network connections, and creating GUIs.