Last Updated on August 22, 2023
Pike is an interpreted, general-purpose, high-level, cross-platform, dynamic programming language. Its syntax is similar to C and C++, but it is much easier to learn and use. It can be used for small scripts as well as for large programs.
Pike features garbage collection, advanced data types, and first-class anonymous functions, with support for many programming paradigms, including object-oriented, functional and imperative programming.
Pike can be used to write small and simple scripts, and also for very large programs: the World Wide Web servers Roxen WebServer and Caudium are both written in Pike. Pike’s advanced data types and built-in support for sockets makes it ideal for use in internet applications.
Pike is free software, distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), and Mozilla Public License (MPL). Pike is available for many operating systems, including Linux, Solaris, OS X and Microsoft Windows.
Here’s our recommended tutorials to learn Pike. If you want something more substantial, read the book Programming, using and understanding by Fredrik Hübinette.
1. Pike Beginner’s Tutorial by The Pike Development Team
This is a fairly detailed tutorial explaining the fundamental concepts, introduces data types, explains methods, object-oriented programming, statements, working with strings, expressions, the preprocessor, modules, and errors/error handling.
2. Your Very First Pike Program by Roxen
It is traditional to start a book or tutorial about a programming language with a very simple example: a program that just writes the text “Hello world!” on the screen. Here it is in Pike.
3. At the behest … (Pike programming language) by Sudonull
This article is a very brief introduction to Pike.
All tutorials in this series:
| Free Programming Tutorials | |
|---|---|
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| OpenCL | Open Computing Language |
| Pascal | Imperative and procedural language designed in the late 1960s |
| Perl | High-level, general-purpose, interpreted, scripting, dynamic language |
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| PHP | PHP has been at the helm of the web for many years |
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