Terms

Question 1

Concise definition of programming language simplicity

Answer 1

Simplicity in a language, therefore, is at least in part the result of a combination
of a relatively small number of primitive constructs and a limited use
of the concept of orthogonality.

Question 2

orthogonality

Question 3

abstraction

Answer 3

ability to define and then use complicated
structures or operations in ways that allow many of the details to be ignored.

Question 4

two forms of abstraction

Answer 4

process (subroutines)

data (objects that are more intuitive to understand)

Question 5

expressivity

Answer 5

a language has
relatively convenient, rather than cumbersome, ways of specifying computations.

Question 6

aliasing

Answer 6

having two or more distinct names that can be
used to access the same memory cell.

It is now widely accepted that aliasing
is a dangerous feature in a programming language.

Question 7

cost of a language

Answer 7

1. cost of training programmers to use the language
2. cost of writing programs in the language
3. cost of compiling programs in the language
4. cost of executing programs written in a language is greatly

influenced by that language’s design. A language that requires many run-time
type checks will prohibit fast code execution, regardless of the quality of the
compiler. Although execution efficiency was the foremost concern in the design
of early languages, it is now considered to be less important.

5. cost of the language implementation
   system. (eg Java can be implemented anywhere)
6. cost of poor reliability
7. cost of maintaining programs

Of all the contributors to language costs, three are most important: program
development, maintenance, and reliability. Because these are functions of writability
and readability, these two evaluation criteria are, in turn, the most important.

Question 8

major disadvantage of functional programming languages

Answer 8

not optimized for von neumann architecture the way imperative languages are

Question 9

SIMULA 67

Answer 9

first language
to provide even limited support for data abstraction

Question 10

Smalltalk

Answer 10

first object-oriented language, 1989

Question 11

example of tradeoff between reliability and cost of execution

Answer 11

java checks that arrays are in range, adds execution cost for the sake of reliability

Question 12

load module,
or executable image

Answer 12

The user and system code together

Question 13

von Neumann bottleneck

Answer 13

The speed of the connection between a computer’s memory and its processor
usually determines the speed of the computer, because instructions often
can be executed faster than they can be moved to the processor for execution.

Question 14

disadvantages of pure interpreted languages

Answer 14

regardless of how many times a statement is executed, it must be
decoded every time. Therefore, statement decoding, rather than the connection
between the processor and memory, is the bottleneck of a pure interpreter.

requires more
space.

execution is 10 to 100 times slower than in compiled systems.

Question 15

Hybrid Implementation Systems

Answer 15

mix of pure interpreted and compiled languages

only compile each statement once

eg Perl, Java w JVM

Question 16

Just In Time implementation

Answer 16

initially translates programs
to an intermediate language. Then, during execution, it compiles intermediate
language methods into machine code when they are called. The machine code
version is kept for subsequent calls.

eg .NET, some recent Java

Question 17

Short Code

Answer 17

used in UNIVAC I

each line consists of six, 12-byte codes

pure interpreted, 50 times slower than machine code

Question 18

Speedcoding

Answer 18

developed for IBM 701, 1954

tools for FLOPS, such as trig operations and exp and log

made matrix math much easier

Question 19

FLPL

Answer 19

Fortran List Processing language, developed by IBM for geometry theorem-proving