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In computer science, a programming language is said to have first-class functions if it treats functions as first-class citizens. This means the language supports passing functions as arguments to other functions, returning them as the values from other functions, and assigning them to variables or storing them in data structures. [ 1 ]
C appears to support assignment of array pointers, but in fact these are simply pointers to the array's first element, and again do not carry the array's size. [citation needed] In most languages, data types are not first-class objects, though in some object-oriented languages, classes are first-class objects and are instances of metaclasses.
Many languages have explicit pointers or references. Reference types differ from these in that the entities they refer to are always accessed via references; for example, whereas in C++ it's possible to have either a std:: string and a std:: string *, where the former is a mutable string and the latter is an explicit pointer to a mutable string (unless it's a null pointer), in Java it is only ...
For example, in the Pascal programming language, the declaration type MyTable = array [1.. 4, 1.. 2] of integer, defines a new array data type called MyTable. The declaration var A: MyTable then defines a variable A of that type, which is an aggregate of eight elements, each being an integer variable identified by two indices.
For example, a programmer may write a function in source code that is compiled to machine code that implements similar semantics. There is a callable unit in the source code and an associated one in the machine code, but they are different kinds of callable units – with different implications and features.
In object oriented programming, objects provide a layer which can be used to separate internal from external code and implement abstraction and encapsulation. External code can only use an object by calling a specific instance method with a certain set of input parameters, reading an instance variable, or writing to an instance variable.
In addition to support for vectorized arithmetic and relational operations, these languages also vectorize common mathematical functions such as sine. For example, if x is an array, then y = sin (x) will result in an array y whose elements are sine of the corresponding elements of the array x. Vectorized index operations are also supported.
In the C++ programming language, a reference is a simple reference datatype that is less powerful but safer than the pointer type inherited from C.The name C++ reference may cause confusion, as in computer science a reference is a general concept datatype, with pointers and C++ references being specific reference datatype implementations.