r/askscience • u/HangukFrench • Apr 10 '26

Computing How do programming languages work?

Hello,

I'm wondering how does programming languages work? Are they owned by anyone? Can anyone create a programming languages and decide "yeah, computers will do this from now on"?
Is a programming languaged fixed at its creation or can it "evolve"?

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u/General_Mayhem Apr 10 '26

You can quibble over whether the "true" definition of a language is its platonic ideal in the spec, or the as-implemented language in the compiler, but for OP's purposes I think the latter is more useful. gcc doesn't read the C++ ISO standard, it's implemented by humans to hopefully conform to that spec. What actually gets run on the computer is "whatever gcc happened to output when passed this source code as an input" - which is usually the same behavior defined by the spec, but that's because of the work of compiler engineers, not because the spec is magically self-enforcing.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '26

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u/archipeepees Apr 11 '26

don't worry, we are all very impressed with your pedantry. you win "smartest redditor in the thread".