Programming idiom

Knowing the idioms associated with a programming language and how to use them is an important part of gaining fluency in that language, and transferring knowledge in the form of analogies from one language or framework to another.

The adverbial or adjectival use of the term often takes the meaning of using a programming language in a typical way. For example, an idiomatic way to manage dynamic memory in C would be to use the C standard library functions malloc and free. Such code would be well intelligible to somebody familiar with C, and would be unlikely to cause issues with software portability to different computing platforms. On the other hand, if the code would forgo the use of these standard functions, and instead request memory using the system call sbrk to achieve some special behavior, that could be considered non-idiomatic; it would require more effort to understand and not be portable to non-Unix-like systems.

Examples of simple idioms

Printing Hello World

Main article: "Hello, World!" program

One of the most common starting points to learn to program or notice the syntax differences between a known language and a new one.

It has several implementations, among them the code fragments for C++:

std::cout << "Hello World\n";

For Java:

System.out.println("Hello World");

Inserting an element in an array

This idiom helps developers understand how to manipulate collections in a given language, particularly inserting an element x at a position i in a list s and moving the elements to its right.

Code fragments:

For Python:

s.insert(i, x)

For JavaScript:

s.splice(i, 0, x);

For Perl:

splice(@s, $i, 0, $x)

See also

• Algorithmic skeleton
• Embedded SQL (kind of "standard idiom" to use in any language)
• Idiom

External links

• programming-idioms.org shows short idioms implementations in most mainstream languages.
• C++ programming idioms from Wikibooks.