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I begin this tutorial a few weeks ago with Part I and received some very nice comments correcting my (fortunately) minor errors. This isn't a tutorial about how to program in a specific language or even really about how to program. I wanted to show the common structure of interpreted programming languages in the hopes of revealing some common threads, rather than focusing on the ins and outs of one language. I've heard it said that if you learn one language, it makes learning the next one easier. My problem is I get lost in the nuances of the language in question and lose track of the basic structure of programming...
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...I've created this tutorial series to try and correct that. This tutorial is for my education as much as anyone else's so I welcome comments but, as I said before, be polite. This is about learning.
Speaking of Languages, code examples are presented in JavaScript, Python, and Ruby. I figured this represented a healthy cross-section of commonly used interpreted languages. Now, on with the show.
In our last episode (sorry, couldn't resist), we left off with Arrays and Booleans. The tutorial picks up with methods of flow control. According to Wikipedia, flow control is "a statement whose execution results in a choice being made as to which of two or more paths should be followed. For non-strict functional languages, functions and language constructs exist to achieve the same result, but they are not necessarily called control flow statements." In other words, it's a way of making decisions within the program given different conditions. Speaking of which... Full Story |
One could easily show the same examples in a compiled language, never mind that there probably are declarative languages that are interpreted (some of the examples won't work in those...).
(make "probably" "definitely" if you consider a VM an interpreter)
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