Extensible

Why Trust Techopedia

What Does Extensible Mean?

Extensibility is a measurement of a piece of technology’s capacity to append additional elements and features to its existing structure. A software program, for example, is considered extensible when its operations may be augmented with add-ons and plugins. Extensible programming languages have the ability to define new features and introduce new functionality within them.

Advertisements

Techopedia Explains Extensible

The concept of extensibility has existed since at least 1960, during which computer scientists and programmers like Douglas McIlroy and Tony Brooker posited ideas about programming languages and software whose features could grow and be expanded upon through time. The idea was further solidified in 1969 at the Extensible Languages Symposium, where Carlos Christensen outlined the idea of a programming language that could be extended with “meta-language” with the ability to “expand, contract, or otherwise modify the definition of the base language.”

Advertisements

Related Terms

Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.