What Is Programming
The process of developing and implementing various sets of instructions to enable a computer to do a certain task. These instructions are considered computer programs and help the computer to operate smoothly. The language used to program computers is not understood by an untrained eye. Computer programming continues to be a necessary process as the Internet continues to expand.
Computer Programming Language
Computer programming language, any of various languages for expressing a set of detailed instructions for a digital computer. Such instructions can be executed directly when they are in the computer manufacturer-specific numerical form known as machine language, after a simple substitution process when expressed in a corresponding assembly language, or after translation from some “higher-level” language. Although there are over 2,000 computer languages, relatively few are widely used.
Machine and assembly languages are “low-level,” requiring a programmer to manage explicitly all of a computer’s idiosyncratic features of data storage and operation. In contrast, high-level languages shield a programmer from worrying about such considerations and provide a notation that is more easily written and read by programmers.
Language Types
Machine and assembly languages.
A machine language consists of the numeric codes for the operations that a particular computer can execute directly. The codes are strings of 0s and 1s, or binary digits (“bits”), which are frequently converted both from and to hexadecimal (base 16) for human viewing and modification. Machine language instructions typically use some bits to represent operations, such as addition, and some to represent operands, or perhaps the location of the next instruction. Machine language is difficult to read and write, since it does not resemble conventional mathematical notation or human language, and its codes vary from computer to computer.
Assembly language is one level above machine language. It uses short mnemonic codes for instructions and allows the programmer to introduce names for blocks of memory that hold data. One might thus write “add pay, total” instead of “0110101100101000” for an instruction that adds two numbers.
Assembly language is designed to be easily translated into machine language. Although blocks of data may be referred to by name instead of by their machine addresses, assembly language does not provide more sophisticated means of organizing complex information. Like machine language, assembly language requires detailed knowledge of internal computer architecture. It is useful when such details are important, as in programming a computer to interact with input/output devices (printers, scanners, storage devices, and so forth).
Algorithmic languages.
Algorithmic languages are designed to express mathematical or symbolic computations. They can express algebraic operations in notation similar to mathematics and allow the use of subprograms that package commonly used operations for reuse. They were the first high-level languages.
FORTRAN.
The first important algorithmic language was FORTRAN (formula translation), designed in 1957 by an IBM team led by John Backus. It was intended for scientific computations with real numbers and collections of them organized as one- or multidimensional arrays. Its control structures included conditional IF statements, repetitive loops (so-called DO loops), and a GOTO statement that allowed nonsequential execution of program code. FORTRAN made it convenient to have subprograms for common mathematical operations, and built libraries of them.
FORTRAN was also designed to translate into efficient machine language. It was immediately successful and continues to evolve.
ALGOL.
ALGOL (algorithmic language) was designed by a committee of American and European computer scientists during 1958–60 for publishing algorithms, as well as for doing computations. Like LISP (described in the next section), ALGOL had recursive subprograms—procedures that could invoke themselves to solve a problem by reducing it to a smaller problem of the same kind. ALGOL introduced block structure, in which a program is composed of blocks that might contain both data and instructions and have the same structure as an entire program. Block structure became a powerful tool for building large programs out of small components.
ALGOL contributed a notation for describing the structure of a programming language, Backus–Naur Form, which in some variation became the standard tool for stating the syntax (grammar) of programming languages. ALGOL was widely used in Europe, and for many years it remained the language in which computer algorithms were published. Many important languages, such as Pascal and Ada (both described later), are its descendants.
LISP.
LISP (list processing) was developed about 1960 by John McCarthy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was founded on the mathematical theory of recursive functions (in which a function appears in its own definition). A LISP program is a function applied to data, rather than being a sequence of procedural steps as in FORTRAN and ALGOL. LISP uses a very simple notation in which operations and their operands are given in a parenthesized list. For example, (+ a (* b c)) stands for a + b*c. Although this appears awkward, the notation works well for computers. LISP also uses the list structure to represent data, and, because programs and data use the same structure, it is easy for a LISP program to operate on other programs as data.
LISP became a common language for artificial intelligence (AI) programming, partly owing to the confluence of LISP and AI work at MIT and partly because AI programs capable of “learning” could be written in LISP as self-modifying programs. LISP has evolved through numerous dialects, such as Scheme and Common LISP.
C.
The C programming language was developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan at the AT&T Corporation for programming computer operating systems. Its capacity to structure data and programs through the composition of smaller units is comparable to that of ALGOL. It uses a compact notation and provides the programmer with the ability to operate with the addresses of data as well as with their values. This ability is important in systems programming, and C shares with assembly language the power to exploit all the features of a computer’s internal architecture. C, along with its descendant C++, remains one of the most common languages.
Business-oriented languages
COBOL
COBOL (common business oriented language) has been heavily used by businesses since its inception in 1959. A committee of computer manufacturers and users and U.S. government organizations established CODASYL (Committee on Data Systems and Languages) to develop and oversee the language standard in order to ensure its portability across diverse systems.
COBOL uses an English-like notation—novel when introduced. Business computations organize and manipulate large quantities of data, and COBOL introduced the record data structure for such tasks. A record clusters heterogeneous data such as a name, ID number, age, and address into a single unit. This contrasts with scientific languages, in which homogeneous arrays of numbers are common. Records are an important example of “chunking” data into a single object, and they appear in nearly all modern languages.
SQL.
SQL (structured query language) is a language for specifying the organization of databases (collections of records). Databases organized with SQL are called relational because SQL provides the ability to query a database for information that falls in a given relation. For example, a query might be “find all records with both last_name Smith and city New York.” Commercial database programs commonly use a SQL-like language for their queries.
Education-oriented languages
BASIC
BASIC (beginner’s all-purpose symbolic instruction code) was designed at Dartmouth College in the mid-1960 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. It was intended to be easy to learn by novices, particularly non-computer science majors, and to run well on a time-sharing computer with many users. It had simple data structures and notation and it was interpreted: a BASIC program was translated line-by-line and executed as it was translated, which made it easy to locate programming errors.
Its small size and simplicity also made BASIC a popular language for early personal computers. Its recent forms have adopted many of the data and control structures of other contemporary languages, which makes it more powerful but less convenient for beginners.
Pascal
About 1970 Niklaus Wirth of Switzerland designed Pascal to teach structured programming, which emphasized the orderly use of conditional and loop control structures without GOTO statements. Although Pascal resembled ALGOL in notation, it provided the ability to define data types with which to organize complex information, a feature beyond the capabilities of ALGOL as well as FORTRAN and COBOL. User-defined data types allowed the programmer to introduce names for complex data, which the language translator could then check for correct usage before running a program.
LOGO
Logo originated in the late 1960 as a simplified LISP dialect for education; Seymour Papert and others used it at MIT to teach mathematical thinking to schoolchildren. It had a more conventional syntax than LISP and featured “turtle graphics,” a simple method for generating computer graphics. (The name came from an early project to program a turtlelike robot.) Turtle graphics used body-centred instructions, in which an object was moved around a screen by commands, such as “left 90” and “forward,” that specified actions relative to the current position and orientation of the object rather than in terms of a fixed framework. Together with recursive routines, this technique made it easy to program intricate and attractive patterns.
Hypertalk
Hypertalk was designed as “programming for the rest of us” by Bill Atkinson for Apple’s Macintosh. Using a simple English-like syntax, Hypertalk enabled anyone to combine text, graphics, and audio quickly into “linked stacks” that could be navigated by clicking with a mouse on standard buttons supplied by the program. Hypertalk was particularly popular among educators in the 1980s and early ’90s for classroom multimedia presentations. Although Hypertalk had many features of object-oriented languages (described in the next section), Apple did not develop it for other computer platforms and let it languish; as Apple’s market share declined in the 1990s, a new cross-platform way of displaying multimedia left Hypertalk all but obsolete (see the section World Wide Web display languages).
Object-oriented languages
Object-oriented languages help to manage complexity in large programs. Objects package data and the operations on them so that only the operations are publicly accessible and internal details of the data structures are hidden. This information hiding made large-scale programming easier by allowing a programmer to think about each part of the program in isolation. In addition, objects may be derived from more general ones, “inheriting” their capabilities. Such an object hierarchy made it possible to define specialized objects without repeating all that is in the more general ones.
Object-oriented programming began with the Simula language (1967), which added information hiding to ALGOL. Another influential object-oriented language was Smalltalk (1980), in which a program was a set of objects that interacted by sending messages to one another.
C++
The C++ language, developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at AT&T in the mid-1980s, extended C by adding objects to it while preserving the efficiency of C programs. It has been one of the most important languages for both education and industrial programming. Large parts of many operating systems, such as the Microsoft Corporation’s Windows 98, were written in C++.
Ada
Ada was named for Augusta Ada King, countess of Lovelace, who was an assistant to the 19th-century English inventor Charles Babbage, and is sometimes called the first computer programmer. Ada, the language, was developed in the early 1980s for the U.S. Department of Defense for large-scale programming. It combined Pascal-like notation with the ability to package operations and data into independent modules. Its first form, Ada 83, was not fully object-oriented, but the subsequent Ada 95 provided objects and the ability to construct hierarchies of them. While no longer mandated for use in work for the Department of Defense, Ada remains an effective language for engineering large programs.
Java
In the early 1990s, Java was designed by Sun Microsystems, Inc., as a programming language for the World Wide Web (WWW). Although it resembled C++ in appearance, it was fully object-oriented. In particular, Java dispensed with lower-level features, including the ability to manipulate data addresses, a capability that is neither desirable nor useful in programs for distributed systems. In order to be portable, Java programs are translated by a Java Virtual Machine specific to each computer platform, which then executes the Java program. In addition to adding interactive capabilities to the Internet through Web “applets,” Java has been widely used for programming small and portable devices, such as mobile telephones.
Visual Basic
Visual Basic was developed by Microsoft to extend the capabilities of BASIC by adding objects and “event-driven” programming: buttons, menus, and other elements of graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Visual Basic can also be used within other Microsoft software to program small routines.
Declarative languages
Declarative languages, also called non procedural or very high level, are programming languages in which (ideally) a program specifies what is to be done rather than how to do it. In such languages there is less difference between the specification of a program and its implementation than in the procedural languages described so far. The two common kinds of declarative languages are logic and functional languages.
Logic programming languages, of which PROLOG (programming in logic) is the best known, state a program as a set of logical relations (e.g., a grandparent is the parent of a parent of someone). Such languages are similar to the SQL database language. A program is executed by an “inference engine” that answers a query by searching these relations systematically to make inferences that will answer a query. PROLOG has been used extensively in natural language processing and other AI programs.
Functional languages have a mathematical style. A functional program is constructed by applying functions to arguments. Functional languages, such as LISP, ML, and Haskell, are used as research tools in language development, in automated mathematical theorem provers, and in some commercial projects.
Scripting languages
Scripting languages are sometimes called little languages. They are intended to solve relatively small programming problems that do not require the overhead of data declarations and other features needed to make large programs manageable. Scripting languages are used for writing operating system utilities, for special-purpose file-manipulation programs, and, because they are easy to learn, sometimes for considerably larger programs.
PERL (practical extraction and report language) was developed in the late 1980s, originally for use with the UNIX operating system. It was intended to have all the capabilities of earlier scripting languages. PERL provided many ways to state common operations and thereby allowed a programmer to adopt any convenient style. In the 1990s it became popular as a system-programming tool, both for small utility programs and for prototypes of larger ones. Together with other languages discussed below, it also became popular for programming computer Web “servers.”
Document formatting languages
Document formatting languages specify the organization of printed text and graphics. They fall into several classes: text formatting notation that can serve the same functions as a word processing program, page description languages that are interpreted by a printing device, and, most generally, markup languages that describe the intended function of portions of a document.
TeX
TeX was developed during 1977–86 as a text formatting language by Donald Knuth, a Stanford University professor, to improve the quality of mathematical notation in his books. Text formatting systems, unlike WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) word processors, embed plain text formatting commands in a document, which are then interpreted by the language processor to produce a formatted document for display or printing. TeX marks italic text, for example, as {\it this is italicized}, which is then displayed as this is italicized.
TeX largely replaced earlier text formatting languages. Its powerful and flexible abilities gave an expert precise control over such things as the choice of fonts, layout of tables, mathematical notation, and the inclusion of graphics within a document. It is generally used with the aid of “macro” packages that define simple commands for common operations, such as starting a new paragraph; LaTeX is a widely used package. TeX contains numerous standard “style sheets” for different types of documents, and these may be further adapted by each user. There are also related programs such as BibTeX, which manages bibliographies and has style sheets for all of the common bibliography styles, and versions of TeX for languages with various alphabets.
PostScript
PostScript is a page-description language developed in the early 1980s by Adobe Systems Incorporated on the basis of work at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Such languages describe documents in terms that can be interpreted by a personal computer to display the document on its screen or by a microprocessor in a printer or a typesetting device.
PostScript commands can, for example, precisely position text, in various fonts and sizes, draw images that are mathematically described, and specify colour or shading. PostScript uses postfix, also called reverse Polish notation, in which an operation name follows its arguments. Thus, “300 600 20 270 arc stroke” means: draw (“stroke”) a 270-degree arc with radius 20 at location (300, 600). Although PostScript can be read and written by a programmer, it is normally produced by text formatting programs, word processors, or graphic display tools.
The success of PostScript is due to its specification’s being in the public domain and to its being a good match for high-resolution laser printers. It has influenced the development of printing fonts, and manufacturers produce a large variety of PostScript fonts.
SGML
SGML (standard generalized markup language) is an international standard for the definition of markup languages; that is, it is a metalanguage. Markup consists of notations called tags that specify the function of a piece of text or how it is to be displayed. SGML emphasizes descriptive markup, in which a tag might be “.” Such a markup denotes the document function, and it could be interpreted as reverse video on a computer screen, underlining by a typewriter, or italics in typeset text.
SGML is used to specify DTDs (document type definitions). A DTD defines a kind of document, such as a report, by specifying what elements must appear in the document—e.g., —and giving rules for the use of document elements, such as that a paragraph may appear within a table entry but a table may not appear within a paragraph. A marked-up text may be analyzed by a parsing program to determine if it conforms to a DTD. Another program may read the markups to prepare an index or to translate the document into PostScript for printing. Yet another might generate large type or audio for readers with visual or hearing disabilities.</div><div><br></div><h3>World Wide Web display languages<br>HTML</h3><div>The <b>World Wide Web</b> is a system for displaying text, graphics, and audio retrieved over the Internet on a computer monitor. Each retrieval unit is known as a Web page, and such pages frequently contain “links” that allow related pages to be retrieved. HTML (hypertext markup language) is the markup language for encoding Web pages. It was designed by Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN nuclear physics laboratory in Switzerland during the 1980s and is defined by an SGML DTD. HTML markup tags specify document elements such as headings, paragraphs, and tables. They mark up a document for display by a computer program known as a Web browser. The browser interprets the tags, displaying the headings, paragraphs, and tables in a layout that is adapted to the screen size and fonts available to it.</div><div><br></div><div>HTML documents also contain anchors, which are tags that specify links to other Web pages. An anchor has the form <a HREF= “http://www.britannica.com”> Encyclopædia Britannica</A>, where the quoted string is the URL (universal resource locator) to which the link points (the Web “address”) and the text following it is what appears in a Web browser, underlined to show that it is a link to another page. What is displayed as a single page may also be formed from multiple URLs, some containing text and others graphics.</div><div><br></div><h3><b>XML</b></h3><div><b>HTML</b> does not allow one to define new text elements; that is, it is not extensible. XML (extensible markup language) is a simplified form of SGML intended for documents that are published on the Web. Like SGML, XML uses DTDs to define document types and the meanings of tags used in them. XML adopts conventions that make it easy to parse, such as that document entities are marked by both a beginning and an ending tag, such as <begin>…</BEGIN>. XML provides more kinds of hypertext links than HTML, such as bidirectional links and links relative to a document subsection.</div><div><br></div><div>Because an author may define new tags, an XML DTD must also contain rules that instruct a Web browser how to interpret them—how an entity is to be displayed or how it is to generate an action such as preparing an e-mail message.</div><div><br></div><h3>Web scripting</h3><div><b>Web</b> pages marked up with <b>HTML</b> or <b>XML</b> are largely static documents. Web scripting can add information to a page as a reader uses it or let the reader enter information that may, for example, be passed on to the order department of an online business. CGI (common gateway interface) provides one mechanism; it transmits requests and responses between the reader’s Web browser and the Web server that provides the page. The CGI component on the server contains small programs called scripts that take information from the browser system or provide it for display. A simple script might ask the reader’s name, determine the Internet address of the system that the reader uses, and print a greeting. Scripts may be written in any programming language, but, because they are generally simple text-processing routines, scripting languages like PERL are particularly appropriate.</div><div><br></div><div>Another approach is to use a language designed for Web scripts to be executed by the browser. JavaScript is one such language, designed by the Netscape Communications Corp., which may be used with both Netscape’s and Microsoft’s browsers. JavaScript is a simple language, quite different from Java. A JavaScript program may be embedded in a Web page with the HTML tag <script language=“JavaScript”>. JavaScript instructions following that tag will be executed by the browser when the page is selected. In order to speed up display of dynamic (interactive) pages, JavaScript is often combined with XML or some other language for exchanging information between the server and the client’s browser. In particular, the XMLHttpRequest command enables asynchronous data requests from the server without requiring the server to resend the entire Web page. This approach, or “philosophy,” of programming is called Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML).</div><div><br></div><div><b>VB Script</b> is a subset of Visual Basic. Originally developed for Microsoft’s Office suite of programs, it was later used for Web scripting as well. Its capabilities are similar to those of JavaScript, and it may be embedded in HTML in the same fashion.</div><div><br></div><div>Behind the use of such scripting languages for Web programming lies the idea of component programming, in which programs are constructed by combining independent previously written components without any further language processing. JavaScript and VB Script programs were designed as components that may be attached to Web browsers to control how they display information.</div><div><br></div><h2 style="text-align: center;">Elements Of Programming</h2><div><br></div><div>Despite rotational differences, contemporary computer languages provide many of the same programming structures. These include basic control structures and data structures. The former provide the means to express algorithms, and the latter provide ways to organize information.</div></div><div><br></div><div><h3>Control structures</h3><div>Programs written in procedural languages, the most common kind, are like recipes, having lists of ingredients and step-by-step instructions for using them. The three basic control structures in virtually every procedural language are:</div><div><br></div><div>1. Sequence—combine the liquid ingredients, and next add the dry ones.</div><div>2. Conditional—if the tomatoes are fresh then simmer them, but if canned, skip this step.</div><div>3. Iterative—beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks.</div><div><br></div><div>Sequence is the default control structure; instructions are executed one after another. They might, for example, carry out a series of arithmetic operations, assigning results to variables, to find the roots of a quadratic equation ax2 + bx + c = 0. The conditional</div><div><br></div><div style="text-align: center;"> IF-THEN</div><div style="text-align: center;">or</div><div style="text-align: center;">IF-THEN-ELSE </div><div><br></div><div>control structure allows a program to follow alternative paths of execution. Iteration, or looping, gives computers much of their power. They can repeat a sequence of steps as often as necessary, and appropriate repetitions of quite simple steps can solve complex problems.</div><div><br></div><div>These control structures can be combined. A sequence may contain several loops; a loop may contain a loop nested within it, or the two branches of a conditional may each contain sequences with loops and more conditionals. In the “pseudocode” used in this article, “*” indicates multiplication and “←” is used to assign values to variables. The following programming fragment employs the IF-THEN structure for finding one root of the quadratic equation, using the <b>quadratic formula</b>:</div><div><br></div><h3>quadratic formula.</h3><div><br></div><div>The quadratic formula assumes that a is nonzero and that the discriminant (the portion within the square root sign) is not negative (in order to obtain a real number root). Conditionals check those assumptions:</div><div><br></div><div>IF a = 0 THEN</div><div> ROOT ← −c/b</div><div>ELSE</div><div> DISCRIMINANT ← b*b − 4*a*c</div><div> IF DISCRIMINANT ≥ 0 THEN</div><div> ROOT ← (−b + SQUARE_ROOT(DISCRIMINANT))/2*a</div><div> ENDIF</div><div>ENDIF</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>The SQUARE_ROOT function used in the above fragment is an example of a subprogram (also called a procedure, subroutine, or function). A subprogram is like a sauce recipe given once and used as part of many other recipes. Subprograms take inputs (the quantity needed) and produce results (the sauce). Commonly used subprograms are generally in a collection or library provided with a language. Subprograms may call other subprograms in their definitions, as shown by the following routine (where ABS is the absolute-value function). SQUARE_ROOT is implemented by using a WHILE (indefinite) loop that produces a good approximation for the square root of real numbers unless x is very small or very large. A subprogram is written by declaring its name, the type of input data, and the output:</div><div><br></div><div><b>FUNCTION SQUARE_ROOT(REAL x) RETURNS REAL</b></div><div><b> ROOT ← 1.0</b></div><div><b> WHILE ABS(ROOT*ROOT − x) ≥ 0.000001</b></div><div><b> AND WHILE ROOT ← (x/ROOT + ROOT)/2</b></div><div><b> RETURN ROOT</b></div><div><br></div><div>Subprograms can break a problem into smaller, more tractable subproblems. Sometimes a problem may be solved by reducing it to a subproblem that is a smaller version of the original. In that case the routine is known as a recursive subprogram because it solves the problem by repeatedly calling itself. For example, the factorial function in mathematics (n! = n∙(n−1)⋯3∙2∙1—i.e., the product of the first n integers), can be programmed as a recursive routine:</div><div><br></div><div><b>FUNCTION FACTORIAL(INTEGER n) RETURNS INTEGER</b></div><div><b> IF n = 0 THEN RETURN 1</b></div><div><b> ELSE RETURN n * FACTORIAL(n−1)</b></div><div><br></div><div>The advantage of recursion is that it is often a simple restatement of a precise definition, one that avoids the bookkeeping details of an iterative solution.</div><div><br></div><div>At the machine-language level, loops and conditionals are implemented with branch instructions that say “jump to” a new point in the program. The “goto” statement in higher-level languages expresses the same operation but is rarely used because it makes it difficult for humans to follow the “flow” of a program. Some languages, such as Java and Ada, do not allow it.</div></div><div><br></div><div><h2 style="text-align: center;">Data structures</h2><div><br></div><div>Where as control structures organize algorithms, data structures organize information. In particular, data structures specify types of data, and thus which operations can be performed on them, while eliminating the need for a programmer to keep track of memory addresses. Simple data structures include integers, real numbers, Booleans (true/false), and characters or character strings. Compound data structures are formed by combining one or more data types.</div><div><br></div><div>The most important compound data structures are the array, a homogeneous collection of data, and the record, a heterogeneous collection. An array may represent a vector of numbers, a list of strings, or a collection of vectors (an array of arrays, or mathematical matrix). A record might store employee information—name, title, and salary. An array of records, such as a table of employees, is a collection of elements, each of which is heterogeneous. Conversely, a record might contain a vector—i.e., an array.</div><div><br></div><div>Record components, or fields, are selected by name; for example, E.SALARY might represent the salary field of record E. An array element is selected by its position or index; A[10] is the element at position 10 in array A. A FOR loop (definite iteration) can thus run through an array with index limits (FIRST TO LAST in the following example) in order to sum its elements:</div><div><br></div><div><b>FOR i ← FIRST TO LAST</b></div><div><b> SUM ← SUM + A[i]</b></div><div><br></div><div>Arrays and records have fixed sizes. Structures that can grow are built with dynamic allocation, which provides new storage as required. These data structures have components, each containing data and references to further components (in machine terms, their addresses). Such self-referential structures have recursive definitions. A bintree (binary tree) for example, either is empty or contains a root component with data and left and right bintree “children.” Such bintrees implement tables of information efficiently. Subroutines to operate on them are naturally recursive; the following routine prints out all the elements of a bintree (each is the root of some subtree):</div><div><br></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>PROCEDURE TRAVERSE(ROOT: BINTREE)</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b> IF NOT(EMPTY(ROOT))</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b> TRAVERSE(ROOT.LEFT)</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b> PRINT ROOT.DATA</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b> TRAVERSE(ROOT.RIGHT)</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b> ENDIF</b></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Abstract data types (ADTs) are important for large-scale programming. They package data structures and operations on them, hiding internal details. For example, an ADT table provides insertion and lookup operations to users while keeping the underlying structure, whether an array, list, or binary tree, invisible. In object-oriented languages, classes are ADTs and objects are instances of them. The following object-oriented pseudocode example assumes that there is an ADT bintree and a “superclass” COMPARABLE, characterizing data for which there is a comparison operation (such as “<” for integers). It defines a new ADT, TABLE, that hides its data-representation and provides operations appropriate to tables. This class is polymorphic—defined in terms of an element-type parameter of the COMPARABLE class. Any instance of it must specify that type, here a class with employee data (the COMPARABLE declaration means that PERS_REC must provide a comparison operation to sort records). Implementation details are omitted.</div><div><br></div><div><b>CLASS TABLE OF <comparable T></b></div><div><b> PRIVATE DATA: BINTREE OF <t></b></div><div><b> PUBLIC INSERT(ITEM: T)</b></div><div><b> PUBLIC LOOKUP(ITEM: T) RETURNS BOOLEAN</b></div><div><b> END</b></div><div><br></div><div><b>CLASS PERS_REC: COMPARABLE</b></div><div><b> PRIVATE NAME: STRING</b></div><div><b> PRIVATE POSITION: {STAFF, SUPERVISOR, MANAGER}</b></div><div><b> PRIVATE SALARY: REAL</b></div><div><b> PUBLIC COMPARE (R: PERS_REC) RETURNS BOOLEAN</b></div><div><b> END</b></div><div><b><br></b></div><div><b>EMPLOYEES: TABLE <pers_rec></b></div><div><b><br></b></div><div>TABLE makes public only its own operations; thus, if it is modified to use an array or list rather than a bintree, programs that use it cannot detect the change. This information hiding is essential to managing complexity in large programs. It divides them into small parts, with “contracts” between the parts; here the TABLE class contracts to provide lookup and insertion operations, and its users contract to use only the operations so publicized.</div></div><div><br></div><div>Published By Waqas Ahmed Mir.</div></div></font></span></div><div><br></div>
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