Designing Your Own Language

• Perl does text processing
• C trys to be simple and fast
• Java trys to be useful for a wide varity of tasks, and be safe doing it.
• PHP is optimized for web pages.
  

• Many languages use ';' to divide statements.
• Python uses \n to divide statements
  
  
• Many langauges use {} to group statements
• Python uses indenting to group statments
  
  
• C++ and Java use // to indicate comments
• Perl and PHP use # to indicate comments
• C++ uses /* */ to indicate a block comment
  

• Many languages are object oriented.
• Java requires you to use objects.
  
  
• C++, C, and Java require you to make methods.
• Perl, PHP, and Python do not require you to make any methods.
  
  
• C++ and Java require you to include or import files.
• Perl and Python don't require you to import files.
  

• Perl defaults to global variables.
• Many languages decide the scope of a variable by location of declaration or first use.
  
  
• C++ and Java require that variables be declared before use.
• Python and PHP require no variable declarations.
  
  
• C++ and Java require that variables be given a type.
• PHP and Python have variables of 'flexible type'.
  
  
• Perl uses a special charactor to declare that a token is a variable, and the type of the variable.
• Python uses a special charactor to declare that a token is a variable, but not it's type.
• Java and C++ require all variables to be declared before use.
  
  
• C++ has variables that that can very in size, but can be adapted to the CPU.
• Java has fixed sized variables that cannot be adapted.
  

• Almost every language has arrays.
• Every language except C has string as a builtin type.
• Python and Lisp have 'set' as a basic data type.
• Perl and PHP have 'Associative Array' as a basic data type.

• Python has an exit clause for 'for' loops.
• Perl allows a for loop to iterate over an array
     for $i @array
• Python allows a for loop to iterate over a list
      for i in list
  

• In Java, every method must be part of a class.
• In most languges, methods can stand alone.
  
  
• In most languages, parameters are indicated by order within the method call.
• In Python, parameters can be indicated by name.
     foo(a, b, type=c)
  
  
• In Perl, variables in a method are by default global.
  

• Perl and Python have strong regular expression features.
• Python has lots of ways