Unification of Programming Languages

Abstract

- Practically every programming language is equipped with primitive data types, iteration and selection constructs, procedures, functions, class and structure definition, exceptions, and so forth to facilitate program development. These are similar in functionality but may differ a little in syntax. Similarly, libraries and packages for functionalities like collections, input/output, and so forth are available with different names to perform similar functions. A programmer has a hard time memorizing the syntax and features of each programming language. The research aims to choose a single unified high-level programming language, a Unified Programming Language (UPL), whose syntax is like of the most commonly existing programming languages. The benefits of learning and adopting a single programming language for programmers can be comforting, but there are some unintended consequences that need to be addressed. This research has gone through several brainstorming sessions and structured walkthroughs within an accessible community to identify and enlist the issues. The most common concern is the usage of a massive amount of existing code/libraries, which results in uncountable manhours and worthwhile investment spent to build it. The subsequent concerns are the availability of programming tools like IDEs and various commonly required libraries and frameworks related to accessing range of databases, files, network streams, and building GUIs and reports. UPL, when released, will be equipped with all necessary libraries, and will provide a set of tools to hook existing libraries frameworks of existing commonly used programming languages like C/C++, JAVA, PHP, PYTHON, .NET languages and JAVASCRIPT, and more. This may be achieved through employing reflection API and documentation, whichever is appropriate. The UPL requires a compiler to generate binary executable code for various platforms.