General-purpose programming language refers to a type of computer programming language suitable for most ordinary computer applications. This would include any language that supports all of the following constructs:
- Comparison of strings and constants
- Branching and looping constructs
- Reading and writing sequential and random files
This is the minimum necessary for a language to be useful for general purpose applications. Most general-purpose languages include many more features than the above, such as means to issue various requests to each operating system that the language runs under, sorting, searching and use of arrays.
Some general-purpose computer programming languages: