Extensible programming: Difference between revisions

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{{short description|Style of computer programming}}

In [[computer science]], '''Extensibleextensible programming''' is a term used in [[computer science]] to describe a style of computer programming that focuses on mechanisms to extend the [[programming language]], [[compiler]], and [[runtime system]] (environment). Extensible programming languages, supporting this style of programming, were an active area of work in the 1960s, but the movement was marginalized in the 1970s.<ref name="Standish1975"/> Extensible programming has become a topic of renewed interest in the 21st century.<ref name="Wilson2005">Gregory V. Wilson, "[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.453.3676&rep=rep1&type=pdf Extensible Programming for the 21st Century]", ''ACM Queue'' 2 no. 9 (Dec/Jan 2004–2005).</ref>

== Historical movement ==

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Standish attributed the failure of the extensibility movement to the difficulty of programming successive extensions. A programmer might build a first shell of macros around a base language. Then, if a second shell of macros is built around that, any subsequent programmer must be intimately familiar with both the base language, and the first shell. A third shell would require familiarity with the base and both the first and second shells, and so on. Shielding a programmer from lower-level details is the intent of the [[Abstraction (computer science)|abstraction]] movement that supplanted the extensibility movement.

Despite the earlier presentation of Simula as extensible, by 1975, Standish's survey does not seem in practice to have included the newer abstraction-based technologies (though he used a very general definition of extensibility that technically could have included them). A 1978 history of programming abstraction from the invention of the computer until then, made no mention of macros, and gave no hint that the extensible languages movement had ever occurred.<ref name="Guarino1978">Guarino, L.R., "[httphttps://wwwcds.dticcern.milch/get-tr-docrecord/pdf?AD=ADA059394119689 The Evolution of Abstraction in Programming Languages]{{dead link|date=June 2022|bot=medic}}{{cbignore|bot=medic}}", ''CMU-CS-78-120'', Department of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pennsylvania, 22 May 1978.</ref> Macros were tentatively admitted into the abstraction movement by the late 1980s (perhaps due to the advent of [[hygienic macros]]), by being granted the pseudonym ''syntactic abstractions''.<ref name="Gabriel1989">Gabriel, Richard P., ed., "[https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=66092 Draft Report on Requirements for a Common Prototyping System]", ''SIGPLAN Notices'' 24 no. 3 (March 1989), pp. 93ff.</ref>

== Modern movement ==

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=== Source language debugging support ===

Extensible programming systems must support the debugging of programs using the constructs of the original source language regardless of the extensions or transformation the program has undergone in order to make it executable. Most notably, it cannot be assumed that the only way to display runtime data is in ''structures'' or ''arrays''. The debugger, or more correctly 'program inspector', must permit the display of runtime data in forms suitable to the source language. For example, if the language supports a data structure for a [[business process]] or [[work flow]], it must be possible for the debugger to display that data structure as a [[fishbone chart]] or other form provided by a plugin.

==Examples==

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* [[XML]]

* [[Forth (programming language)|Forth]]

* [[Factor (programming language)|Factor]]

* [[Lisp (programming language)|Lisp]]

** [[Racket (programming language)|Racket]]

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=== Tools ===

# [http://www.meta-language.net/ MetaL] – [https://web.archive.org/web/20050220100913/http://pyre.third-bit.com/pipermail/extprog/2005-January/000019.html an extensible programming compiler engine implementation]

# [httphttps://sourceforge.net/projects/extprosys/ XPS] – eXtensible Programming System (in development)

# [http://www.jetbrains.com/mps/ MPS] – JetBrains Metaprogramming system

=== Languages with extensible syntax ===

# [httphttps://openzz.sourceforge.net/ OpenZz]

# [http://cs.nyu.edu/rgrimm/xtc/ xtc – eXTensible C]

# [https://github.com/pannous/english-script English-script]

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# [https://web.archive.org/web/20050817205802/http://boo.codehaus.org/Syntactic+Macros Boo Syntactic Macros]

# [https://web.archive.org/web/20061022071450/http://suif.stanford.edu/ Stanford University Intermediate Format compiler]

# [httphttps://seed7.sourceforge.net/ Seed7 – The extensible programming language]

# [https://github.com/chrisseaton/katahdin Katahdin] yy– a language with syntax and semantics that are mutable at runtime

# [http://www.pi-programming.org/What.html π] – a language with extensible syntax, implemented using an [[Earley parser]]