What is “Orthogonality”?

Question

What does \"orthogonality\" mean when talking about programming languages?

What are some examples of Orthogonality?

Answer 1

In programming languages a programming language feature is said to be orthogonal if it is bounded with no restrictions (or exceptions). For example, in Pascal functions can't return structured types. This is a restriction on returning values from a function. Therefore we it is considered as a non-orthogonal feature. ;)