Low-Level Facilities

Abstract

High-level languages encourage and even force the programmer to conceive his programs in a structured fashion. Structured statements provide a high degree of order and perspicuity of the programmed algorithmic text. Structured data declarations allow a high level of abstraction in the organization of a program’s data and their organization in terms that are appropriate for the problem at hand. The principal advantage is additional safety against mistakes, because structure provides redundancy which can (and must) be used by implementations — in particular compilers — to detect inconsistencies of the program which become manifest as violations of language rules. In this respect, the concept of data types is particularly powerful and is therefore the primary characteristic of high-level programming languages.