Programming idiom

In

Knowing the idioms associated with a programming language and how to use them is an important part of gaining

A common misconception is to use the adverbial or adjectival form of the term as using a programming language in a typical way, which really refers to a idiosyncrasy. An idiom implies the semantics of some code in a programming language has similarities to other languages or frameworks. For example, an idiosyncratic way to manage dynamic memory in C would be to use the C standard library functions malloc and free, whereas idiomatic refers to manual memory management as recurring semantic role that can be achieved with code fragments malloc in C, or pointer = new type [number_of_elements] in C++. In both cases, the semantics of the code are intelligible to developers familiar with C or C++, once the idiomatic or idiosyncratic rationale is exposed to them. However, while idiomatic rationale is often general to the programming domain, idiosyncratic rationale is frequently tied to specific API terminology.

Examples of simple idioms

Printing Hello World

One of the most common starting points to learn to program or notice the syntax differences between a known language and a new one.^[3]

It has several implementations, among them the code fragments for C++:

std::cout << "Hello World\n";

For Java:

System.out.println("Hello World");

Inserting an element in an array

This idiom helps developers understand how to manipulate collections in a given language, particularly inserting an element x at a position i in a list s and moving the elements to its right.^[4]

Code fragments:

For Python:

s.insert(i, x)

For JavaScript:

s.splice(i, 0, x);

For Perl:

splice(@s, $i, 0, $x)

See also

• Algorithmic skeleton
• Embedded SQL
• Idiom

References