Making programs??? Creating languages???

[xPass]

How do people actually make installers and applications such as Windshield Installer (how to spell??? :nuts and Warcraft III???

How do they create computer languages that support their programs such as JASS, etc.???

How do we know what natives and functions are there in a language when it was first created???

Lastly, how does a program know what is the language talking about and how to activate the functions?


Hopefully some of you can answer this puzzling questions, which might help some people (ESPECIALLY ME!!!)

 

[UndeadDragon]

How do people actually make installers and applications such as Windshield Installer (how to spell??? :nuts and Warcraft III???

How do they create computer languages that support their programs such as JASS, etc.???

How do we know what natives and functions are there in a language when it was first created???

Lastly, how does a program know what is the language talking about and how to activate the functions?


Hopefully some of you can answer this puzzling questions, which might help some people (ESPECIALLY ME!!!)

1. Installers are usually created by an archive, which is extracted into the correct places on the hard drive.

2. Sub-Programming Languages can be made fairly simply. You just need to interpret the code and convert it into your functions which are built into the program.

3. We know what functions there are in a certain language from the documentation. Every programming language will (at least should) be well documented.

4. A program doesn't really know what the language is talking about. It just understands low level programming. Therefore, when a program is compiled it is actually converted into low level code and the computer can understand this. How to call functions depends on each language, but it is usually just functionName(parameters).

 

[xPass]

3. We know what functions there are in a certain language from the documentation. Every programming language will (at least should) be well documented.

I mean the people who create the language, how do they know it?

 

[Slapshot136]

pretty much what UndeadDragon said, let me just elaborate a bit

1. they usually also have some options of how the program runs, where to put shortcuts if any, and possibly write some stuff in the registry (maybe like an activation key)

2. sub-languages can be very basic or very complex based on what your intended purpose is - you could look at the B.net commands from wc3 as a very simple programming language (/f a xxx, /w xxx yyy, /time, etc.)

3. when it was first created? the original documentation hopefully, otherwise look at all the libraries that it has (libraries are like a set of functions that usually relate to a specific thing, say networking or graphics) - normally these libraries are expanded and updated as the language evolves

4. it just goes step by step very fast starting with the "main" function - whenever a function is called, it goes to the function, does whatever the function does, and then returns to where it was - this gets more complicated with threads, but generally the same thing applies - the program has no clue if what it will do will cause the system to explode unless you specifically program that in - normally the operating system will catch you from doing anything too bad though (but angry beeps are sometimes to be expected from certain actions)

3. (edit) - either the code is defined to run in an operating system or environment (say .exe files in windows, or java applets in a browser), where windows/the browser has specifications as to what to do with the program, or they look at the hardware and see what it can do and then code such that the hardware can run it - by hardware I generally mean the CPU and its instruction set

 

[UndeadDragon]

I mean the people who create the language, how do they know it?

If you are talking about the actually programming language, I'll use C++ as an example. When C++ is compiled, it is converted into Assembly (I think). This assembly is then assembled into binary, which the computer's processor can actually run. To create a new high level programming language you would need to be good with a low level programming language such as Assembly.

I would not reccomend it as the couple of months I spent with Assembly in computer architecture were not nice

 

[tooltiperror]

Though, undead, creating a simple language with regexp's can be rather easy with Perl, Python, or Ruby (and probably others).

 

[UndeadDragon]

Though, undead, creating a simple language with regexp's can be rather easy with Perl, Python, or Ruby (and probably others).

True, but if you want a full language you would have to resort to using a low level language as a base.

 

[seph ir oth]

Lastly, how does a program know what is the language talking about and how to activate the functions?

Let's start at the nitty gritty that the others left out to answer this one.

You got a wire. You feed it electricity. It is now "ON". This is the basis for all computing.

With that, you can make transistors, clocks, logic gates (AND, OR, XOR, etc.) that can do problematic kinda stuff. If you want to know how a really basic computer works, google-search a 1-bit ALU. A 1-bit ALU can add and subtract binary numbers (0 + 0 = 0, 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 1 = 1 carry 1). If you put together 1 bit ALU's you can make more complex ALU's that handle larger numbers.

The next step up would be a machine language. This language is really basic programming (e.g. add $s1, $s2, $s3 would add the contents in the s2 and s3 addresses and save it into s1). The addresses' size can be specified by whatever machine language you are using, but most are 32 or 64 bit.

Here's an example machine circuit:

The PC counter feeds the line of code to the instruction memory which reads the 32/64 bits and breaks it up to do its separate things. In this case, the first few bits are instruction lines, which decide what function is executed (jump for loops? add? subtract?), the others are values for addresses or other things (don't wanna get too specific).

So, with machine language, you can form more complex languages. One line of code in a higher programming language can be anywhere from a few lines of machine code to many lines. It's a lot of parsing information, and is quite annoying imo.

If you're truly interested in this stuff, consider looking into computer science/computer engineering fields.

 

[xPass]

Wow that's long...

 

[SerraAvenger]

I mean the people who create the language, how do they know it?

A question back: How do the authors of a book know the names of the characters in the book?

 

[xPass]

A question back: How do the authors of a book know the names of the characters in the book?

This is kinda long ago... Though for your question, it's still easier than creating languages :banghead: