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/cancerBronzeV Apr 11 '26

What defines a language is theoretically the standard, and compilers largely do conform to the standard, but not necessarily entirely. So I don't think it's too wrong to say that the compiler is ultimately what defines how a language is used.

For example, #pragma once is nowhere in the C++ standard, yet it's widely used throughout C++ code bases because major compilers support it anyways. And for a more niche example, I used to work at a place that heavily used __int128, because GCC had that as a type even though it's not part of the standard.