Abstract
The first programming languages were designed to follow closely the physical design of a computer. The languages that evolved from them, usually called imperative programming languages, are still influenced by the architecture of the computer: they mirror the features of the Von Neumann machine, abstracting from superfluous details and retaining the essential aspects of this architecture.
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Notes
- 1.
The language Haskell mentioned in Exercise 6 in Chap. 1 is functional, not imperative. Although the semantics of identifiers in functional languages is very different from the semantics of variables in imperative languages, the concrete syntax is similar.
- 2.
This should not be confused with the use of the keyword “static” as a modifier in the declaration of a variable in a C++ or Java class, where it indicates that the variable is a class variable rather than an instance variable. As their name suggests, instance variables belong to the objects that are instances of the class, so there is a copy of the variable for each object, whereas there is only one copy of a class variable.
- 3.
As a consequence, although it is possible to modify the state of the object passed as parameter using the reference variable, it is not possible to replace it with another object: the latter would require a change in the reference passed as parameter, which is not possible since it was passed by value.
References
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R. Sebesta, Concepts of Programming Languages, 10th edn (Adison Wesley, Boston, 2012)
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Fernández, M. (2014). General Features of Imperative Languages. In: Programming Languages and Operational Semantics. Undergraduate Topics in Computer Science. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6368-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6368-8_3
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