Programming languages: differences in approach to abstraction

Abstract

Programming languages can be thought of as abstractions from the assembly, necessary for optimizing human interaction with the computer across various domains. Depending on the intended function of a programming language, different approaches to some aspects of this abstraction are employed. For example, languages created for statistical analysis often incorporate a wide range of built-in primitive operators applicable to arrays, whereas general-purpose languages usually have few primitive operators that can only be used on single values. Furthermore, even languages within the same domain may implement different approaches to abstraction. Consider that some relevant general-purpose languages implement an imperative paradigm, while others – a declarative one. To overview these differences more closely, a little comparative study of three general-purpose languages C, Lisp and Haskell and one specialized language J will be done; more specifically, an algorithm for adding together positive integers of an array will be implemented in these four languages while observing their syntactic and semantic specifics.