Characteristics of A Good Programming Language
There might be many reasons for the success of a language, but one obvious reason is the characteristics of the language. Several characteristics believed to be important for making a programming language good are:
Simplicity : A good programming language must be simple and easy to learn and use. It should provide a programmer with a clear, simple and unified set of concepts, which can be easily grasped. The overall simplicity of a programming language strongly affects the readability of the programs written in that language, and programs, which are easier to read and understand, are also easier to maintain. It is also easy to develop and implement a compiler or an interpreter for a programming language, which is simple. However, the power needed for the language should not be sacrificed for simplicity.
Naturalness:- A good language should be natural for the application area, for which it has been designed. That is, it should provide appropriate operators, data structures, control structures, and a natural syntax to facilitate the users to code their problem easily and efficiently.
Abstraction:- Abstraction means the ability to define and then use complicated structures or operations in ways that allow many of the details to be ignored. The degree of abstraction allowed by a programming language directly effects its writ ability. Object oriented language support high degree of abstraction. Hence, writing programs in object oriented language is much easier. Object oriented language also support re usability of program segments due to this features.
Efficiency :- Programs written in a good programming language are efficiently translated into machine code, are efficiently executed, and acquire as little space in the memory as possible. That is a good programming language is supported with a good language translator which gives due consideration to space and time efficiency.
Structured:- Structured means that the language should have necessary features to allow its users to write their programs based on the concepts of structured programming. This property of a moreover, it forces a programmer to look at a problem in a logical way, so that fewer errors are created while writing a program for the problem.
Compactness :- In a good programming language, programmers should be able to express intended operations concisely. A verbose language is generally not liked by programmers, because they need to write too much.
Locality :- A good programming language should be such that while writing a programmer concentrate almost solely on the part of the program around the statement currently being worked with.
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