Welcome to computer-languages-comparison Discussions!

[SurajSSingh]

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What is this project

This is a project to showcase a variety of computer languages to compare and contrast them and provide a common framework to think about the different syntax of the computer languages.

[SurajSSingh]

Hello, my name is Suraj and I am the project founder. I created this project to help others with quickly finding the similarities and differences between a set of programming language.

Motivation

I originally had this idea when I thought about how C#, Python, and Rust provide the concept of a ternary operator. Each of them provide a different way of phrasing the same idea. For example, let's say we have two variables x and y, where x is some boolean value (true or false) and y is either the number 42 or 314 depending on x (for this instance, if x is true then y is 42 and otherwise y is 314). Here is a snippet in each of the three languages:

// C#
var x = true /* or false */;
var y = x ? 42 : 314;

# Python
x = True # or False
y = 42 if x else 314

// Rust
let x = true /* or false */;
let y = if x { 42 } else { 314 };

This got me thinking about what other kinds of difference I could find in syntax provided the same semantics. So I looked for some websites where I could find those similarities and difference. There were many websites that got close to what I was thinking about, the two big ones were: Syntax Across Language and Hyperglot. However, I wanted something that mixed the tables of Syntax Across Language with the in-line comparison of Hyperglot, so I started my own. My hope is that this will provide others an easy reference for comparing various computer based languages.

Inspiration

There are a bunch of websites that inspired me to create this. Here is a short-list of many of them:

• Syntax Across Language: I like the tables showing what a set of languages had in common. Also made it easy to see the many different way to implement the same idea.
• Hyperglot: I liked the tables providing an easy way of comparing code snippets of similar languages.
• Programming Idioms: I liked the ability to select languages to compare, even those with very different programming paradigms.
  You can find more in the Inspirations section of the site.