Comparison of programming languages

Most programming languages will print an error message or throw an exception if an input/output operation or other system call (e.g., chmod, kill) fails, unless the programmer has explicitly arranged for different handling of these events.

No Failsafe I/O: AutoHotkey (global ErrorLevel must be explicitly checked), C,[47] COBOL, Eiffel (it actually depends on the library and it is not defined by the language), GLBasic (will generally cause program to crash), RPG, Lua (some functions do not warn or throw exceptions), and Perl.

[48] Some I/O checking is built in C++ (STL iostreams throw on failure but C APIs like stdio or POSIX do not)[47] and Object Pascal, in Bash[49] it is optional.

The literature on programming languages contains an abundance of informal claims about their relative expressive power, but there is no framework for formalizing such statements nor for deriving interesting consequences.

The Computer Language Benchmarks Game site warns against over-generalizing from benchmark data, but contains a large number of micro-benchmarks of reader-contributed code snippets, with an interface that generates various charts and tables comparing specific programming languages and types of tests.