Characteristics of a Good Language:
Several properties believed to the important with respect to making a language good and useable by human beings are briefly outlined below:
Simplicity:
Programming language that are simple and easy to learn and use are liked by many programmers. Thus, a languages should provide a programmer with a clear, simple, and unified set of concepts which can be easily grasped. There should be minimum number of different concepts, with the rules for their combination being as simple and regular as possible. However, the power needed for the language should not be sacrificed for simplicity.
Naturalness:
A language should be natural for the application area it has been designed. In other words, it should be problem-oriented. It should provide appropriates, data structures, control structures, and a natural syntax in order to facilitate the users to code their problem easily and efficiently.
Efficiency:
Efficiency is certainly a major element in the evaluations of any programming language. Thus, while designing a compiler or an interpreter for a particular language, system programmers must give due consideration to space and time efficiency. A programming language should be such that its programs are efficiently translated into machine code, are efficiently executed, and acquire as little apace in the memory as possible.
Compactness: Less is More
User of a high level, problem oriented language should be able to express intended operations concisely, since this is one of the fundamental reasons for having it. COBOL is generally not liked by many programmers because it is verbose in nature and lacks compactness.
Suitability to Environment:
Depending upon the type of application for which a programming language has been designed, the language must also be made suitable to its environment.
Extensibility:
A good programming language should also allow extension through simple, natural, and elegant mechanism.
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