jaydubya’s blog

I found an interesting article at gamespy.com which describes the evolution of programming languages and the effects they have had on video game development.  It discussed the advantages of object-oriented programming over assembly languages, and it went on to discuss possibilities for further improvements in programming languages.  One example that I was able to clearly understand involved parametric polymorphism.  Although I have absolutely no idea what this concept is, I was able to understand one of their examples.

The writer of this article provided the following example:

In order to add two arrays of integers A[10] and B[10] together with today’s available programming languages, one would write the following code,

int A[10], B[10], C[10];

for (int i = 0, i < 10, i++)

C[i] = A[i] + B[i];

The writer suggests, however, that a more intuitive way to express this would simply be

C = A + B;

The writer argues that future programming languages should accommodate this level of  abstraction in order to decrease programming errors and development time.  The “+” operator should not only be able to add integers, decimals and the like, it should, by the programming language’s definition, be able to successfully operate on arrays as well.

The writer goes on to describe other ways in which future programming languages will evolve and describes why these changes are crucial to the continued improvement of video game design.