A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine (often a computer). Like human languages, programming languages have syntactic and semantic rules used to define meaning. Programming languages are used to facilitate communication about the task of organizing and manipulating information, and to express algorithms precisely. Some authors restrict the term "programming language" to those languages that can express all possible algorithms;In mathematical terms, this means the programming language is Turing-complete sometimes the term "computer language" is used for more limited artificial languages.

Thousands of different programming languagesAs of May 2006 The Encyclopedia of Computer Languages by Murdoch University, Australia lists 8512 computer languages. have been created and new ones are created every year. Few languages ever become sufficiently popular that they are used by more than a few people, but professional programmers may use dozens of different languages during their careers.

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