Lecture 1: Three Things Every Programming Language Has

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Introduction to Scheme

Learning a New Language

There are three things that every programming language has:

  1. primitive expressions
  2. means of combination
  3. means of abstraction

Some languages have more than these, but these are essential core. Notice that there are lots of things not on the list.

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Questions

  1. Make a list of the features from a programming language you are familiar with. Categorize the items on your list as primitive, combination, abstraction, or none. What about conditional statements, for example?
  2. Notice that a way of making choices (conditional statements) is not one of the three things every language has. Do you know of any language without conditional statements? Is there a difference between not have an explicit conditional statement and not being able to make choices?

Whenever you are faced with the task of learning a new language, first try determining what is primitive in the language, how things get combined, and how abstraction is done. This will give you a framework to guide your task. Over the next several lectures, we will be learning Scheme. Our efforts will be guided by this framework.

Last updated at 9:53 am on Friday, August 27, 2004.