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'''Extensible 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 [[Run-time system|runtime 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 ==
The first paper usually<ref name="Standish1975">Standish, Thomas A., "[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7f11/082b409647e8d50dadd3a369a10278b5890f.pdf Extensibility in Programming Language Design]", ''SIGPLAN Notices'' 10 no. 7 (July 1975), pp. 18–21.</ref><ref name="Sammet1969">Sammet, Jean E., ''Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals'', Prentice-Hall, 1969, section III.7.2</ref> associated with the extensible programming language movement is [[Douglas McIlroy|M. Douglas McIlroy's]] 1960 paper on [[Macro (computer science)|macros]] for higher-level programming languages.<ref name="McIlroy1960">McIlroy, M.D., "[https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=367223 Macro Instruction Extensions of Compiler Languages]", ''Communications of the ACM'' 3 no. 4 (April 1960), pp. 214–220.</ref> Another early description of the principle of extensibility occurs in Brooker and Morris's 1960 paper on the [[Compiler-compiler|Compiler-Compiler]].<ref name="Brooker&Morris1962">Brooker, R.A. and Morris, D., "[https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=321106 A General Translation Program for Phrase Structure Languages]", ''Journal of the ACM'' 9 no. 1 (January 1962), pp. 1–10. The paper was received in 1960.</ref> The peak of the movement was marked by two academic symposia, in 1969 and 1971.<ref name="Christensen&Shaw1969">Christensen, C. and Shaw, C.J., eds., Proceedings of the Extensible Languages Symposium, ''SIGPLAN Notices'' 4 no. 8 (August 1969).</ref><ref name="Schuman1971">Schuman, S.A., ed., Proceedings of the International Symposium on Extensible Languages, ''SIGPLAN Notices'' 6 no. 12 (December 1971).</ref> By 1975, a survey article on the movement by Thomas A. Standish<ref name="Standish1975"/> was essentially a post mortem. The [[Forth programming language]] was an exception, but it went essentially unnoticed.
=== Character of the historical movement ===
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Standish attributed the failure of the extensibility movement to the difficulty of programming successive extensions. An ordinary programmer might build a single shell of macros around a base language, but if a second shell of macros was to be built around that, the programmer would have to 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. (Note that shielding the 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 to the (then) present day made no mention of macros, and gave no hint that the extensible languages movement had ever occurred.<ref name="Guarino1978">Guarino, L.R., "[http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=ADA059394 The Evolution of Abstraction in Programming Languages]", ''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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=== Extensible syntax ===
{{category see also|Extensible syntax programming languages}}
This simply means that the source language(s) to be compiled must not be closed, fixed, or static. It must be possible to add new keywords, concepts, and structures to the source language(s). Languages which allow the addition of constructs with user defined syntax include [[Camlp4]], [[OpenC++ (software tool)|OpenC++]], [[Seed7]],<ref name="Zingaro2007">Zingaro, Daniel, "[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.69.2848&rep=rep1&type=pdf Modern Extensible Languages]", SQRL Report 47 McMaster University (October 2007), page 16.</ref> [[Red (programming language)|Red]], [[Rebol]], and [[Felix (programming language)|Felix]]. While it is acceptable for some fundamental and intrinsic language features to be immutable, the system must not rely solely on those language features. It must be possible to add new ones.
=== Extensible compiler ===
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