Types of modern programming languages
The division of languages into universal and specialized.
All popular languages can be divided into universal and specialized. Universal languages are used to solve various tasks. Specialized languages are used for solving one, maximum several types of tasks (for example, working with databases, web-programming or writing scripts for operating system administration).
Types of specialized languages:
- Languages for working with databases:
a)Languages that are part of industrial client-server database management systems (DBMS) (PL-SQL in Oracle DBMS, Transact-SQL in Microsoft SQL Server)
b) languages which are part of other types of DBMS (Visual FoxPro, Microsoft Access, Paradox, etc.)
- Languages for web programming.
a) Languages which are run on a server that supports a website (such as RNR, Perl and VBScript)
b) languages which are executed in the browser (viewer) JavaScript, JScript, VBScript
3.Languages for mathematical calculations
Languages for automating the work of definite software products. (VBA in Microsoft Office)
- Specialized languages of other kinds.
The universal languages are Visual C++, Visual C++.Net, Visual C#.Net, Visual J#.Net, Java, Delphi, Borland C#, Borland C++ Builder.
Although most specialized languages are derived from general languages such as PHP, Perl and JavaScript are derived from C++, VBScript and VBA are derived from Visual Basic, the difference between the specialized and general languages is significant.
Specialized languages are mostly used to write not very large programs, so they are optimized to write programs quickly and reduce the size of the source code, and to a lesser extent to reduce errors, using object-oriented programming and code division into modules. And universal languages are usually used to create large and very large projects, so they are all made to reduce the number of errors and facilitate the design of programs, facilitate the development of large programs.
The main difference between special languages and universal languages:
1) They have fewer object-oriented tools and means to access COM+, DCOM, CORBA technologies, to operating system API functions;
2) Less means of multithreaded programming and distributed programming;
3)Only dynamic types are used (i.e. variable type is determined depending on its value, not when variable is declared), but not static types. The only exception: in Visual FoxPro version 9, you can use static variable types as well.