programming Any piece of program code in a
high-levellanguage which, when (if) its execution terminates, returns a
value. In most programming languages, expressions consist of
constants, variables, operators, functions, and
parentheses.
The operators and functions may be built-in or user defined.
Languages differ on how expressions of different
types may
be combined - with some combination of explicit
casts and
The
syntax of expressions generally follows conventional
mathematical notation, though some languages such as
Lisp or
Forth have their own idiosyncratic syntax.
(2001-05-14)