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Higher-order programming

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Paddy3118 (talk | contribs) at 12:21, 16 November 2013 (Undid revision 581516730 by Qwertyus It is known as being a multi-paradigm language. It doesn't always come down to commercial apps.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Higher-order programming is a style of computer programming that uses software components, like functions, modules or objects, as values. It is usually instantiated with, or borrowed from, models of computation such as lambda calculus which make heavy use of higher-order functions.

For example, in higher-order programming, one can pass functions as arguments to other functions and functions can be the return value of other functions (such as in macros or for interpreting). This style of programming is mostly used in functional programming, but it can also be very useful in regular object-oriented programming. A slightly different interpretation of higher-order programming in the context of object-oriented programming are higher order messages, which let messages have other messages as arguments, rather than functions.

Prominent examples of languages supporting this are C#, ECMAScript (ActionScript, JavaScript, JScript), F#, Haskell, Lisp (Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, others), Lua, Oz, Perl, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, Scala, ML, and Erlang.

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