Flashcards: Programming constructs

An escape sequence is a series of characters used to change the state of computers and their attached peripheral devices.

Exception handling is the process of responding to the occurrence, during computation, of exceptions – anomalous or exceptional conditions requiring special processing – often changing the normal flow of program execution.

A label in a programming language is a sequence of characters that identifies a location within source code.

In computer programming, undefined behavior (UB) is the result of executing computer code that does not have a prescribed behavior by the language specification the code adheres to, for the current state of the program (e.g. memory).

A macro (short for "macroinstruction", from Greek μακρός 'long') in computer science is a rule or pattern that specifies how a certain input sequence (often a sequence of characters) should be mapped to a replacement output sequence (also often a sequence of characters) according to a defined procedure.

Modular programming is a software design technique that emphasizes separating the functionality of a program into independent, interchangeable modules, such that each contains everything necessary to execute only one aspect of the desired functionality.

In programming, operator overloading, sometimes termed operator ad hoc polymorphism, is a specific case of polymorphism, where different operators have different implementations depending on their arguments.

In theoretical computer science and formal language theory, a regular expression (sometimes called a rational expression) is a sequence of characters that define a search pattern, mainly for use in pattern matching with strings, or string matching, i.

In programming languages, closures (also lexical closures or function closures) are techniques for implementing lexically scoped name binding in languages with first-class functions.

In computing, a command is a directive to a computer program acting as an interpreter of some kind, in order to perform a specific task.

In mathematics, an operand is the object of a mathematical operation, a quantity on which an operation is performed.

In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management.

Multiple inheritance is a feature of some object-oriented computer programming languages in which an object or class can inherit characteristics and features from more than one parent object or parent class.

In computer programming, the scope of a name binding – an association of a name to an entity, such as a variable – is the part of a computer program where the binding is valid: where the name can be used to refer to the entity.

In computer science, a call stack is a stack data structure that stores information about the active subroutines of a computer program.

Unspecified behavior is behavior that may vary on different implementations of a programming language.

Microsoft Windows OS family employs some exception handling mechanisms that are based on the operating system specifics.

In computer science, a relational operator is a programming language construct or operator that tests or defines some kind of relation between two entities.

Tombstones are a mechanism to detect dangling pointers that can appear in certain computer programming languages, e.

An assembly is a runtime unit consisting of types and other resources.

In computer programming languages, <b>TypeParameter</b> is a frequently used generic label used in templates to reference an unknown data type, data structure, or class.

In computer programming, the pyramid of doom is a common problem that arises when a program uses many levels of nested indentation to control access to a function.

In computer science, a generator is a special routine that can be used to control the iteration behaviour of a loop.

A language construct is a syntactically allowable part of a program that may be formed from one or more lexical tokens in accordance with the rules of a programming language.

A phantom reference is one of the strengths or levels of 'non strong' reference defined in the Java programming language; the others being weak and soft.

A delimiter is a sequence of one or more characters used to specify the boundary between separate, independent regions in plain text or other data streams.

In computer science, a parameterized macro is a type of macro that is able to insert given objects into its expansion.

In mathematics and computer programming, index notation is used to specify the elements of an array of numbers.