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Encyclopedia > First class function

In computer science, a first class function is a programming language construct that allows a function to be treated in many respects like ordinary data objects. In particular, a first class function can be created during the execution of a program, stored in a data structure, passed as an argument to another function, and, in some programming languages, modified using the data processing facilities of the language. Wikibooks Wikiversity has more about this subject: School of Computer Science Open Directory Project: Computer Science Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies Belief that title science in computer science is inappropriate Categories: Computer science ... A programming language or computer language is a standardized communication technique for expressing instructions to a computer. ... In computer science, a subroutine (function, procedure, or subprogram) is a sequence of code which performs a specific task, as part of a larger program, and is grouped as one, or more, statement blocks; such code is sometimes collected into software libraries. ...


Support for first class functions is widely considered to be a required feature for functional programming languages. Lisp, Scheme, ML, and Haskell are examples of functional programming languages that support first class functions. Functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions. ... Lisp is a reflective, functional programming language family with a long history. ... The Knights of the Lambda Calculus is a semi-mythical organization of wizardly LISP and Scheme hackers. ... ML is a general-purpose functional programming language developed by Robin Milner and others in the late 1970s at Edinburgh University, whose syntax is inspired by ISWIM. Historically, ML stands for metalanguage as it was conceived to develop proof tactics in the LCF theorem prover (the language of which ML... Haskell logo Haskell is a standardized pure functional programming language with non-strict semantics. ...


Most modern programming languages support functions defined statically at compile time. C additionally supports function pointers, which can be stored in data structures and passed as arguments to other functions. Nevertheless, C is not considered to support first class functions, since in general functions cannot be created dynamically during the execution of a program. The closest analog in C is that of a dynamically compiled function created by a just-in-time compiler, which is compiled as an array of machine language instructions in memory and then cast to a function pointer. However, this technique is specific to the underlying hardware architecture and is therefore neither general nor portable. The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a standardized imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for use on the... See also Just in time for the business technique In computing, just-in-time compilation (JIT), also known as dynamic translation, is a technique for improving the performance of interpreted programs. ... A system of codes directly understandable by a computers CPU is termed this CPUs native or machine language. ...


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