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Language Interoperability,  the ability to adapt diverse systems and organizational patterns, is one of the important properties of high-level computer languages. The question that is often asked in the computer world is why are there so many different languages? And the answer is because each language is specifically designed to compute a specific task. For example, there are so many computer languages out there that focus on computing tasks for businesses, while others focus on scientific computations so some of the overall set of attributes or properties are expressed or maintained in the language architecture. Depending on how in depth such properties are implemented or maintained in the computer language architecture, the more expressive it is to maintain the powerful and efficient  language  in terms of its ability to interact with other systems in optimization processing speed or to perform some complex task.

One way you can see the need for computer language interoperability is on some embedded system applications where the need to access and understand different system instruction sets are necessary; meaning that the programmer does not need to learn a completely different language in order to write an application in java that can interact with the cellular phone system. ColdFusion’s ability to communicate with Java classes and utility has made it a powerful way to process complex tasks or tasks that require optimization. For example the need to apply Java library classes that can build large string using append, or reading large files, or writing out large files, or saving large query functions to increase server performance are useful methodologies.  ColdFusion does not only communicate and interact through data transfer, but also can use different software component drivers to retrieve information.

There are a lot of algorithms that seek to solve this problem - given a zip code get its latitudinal and longitudinal values from a database that collects accurate information from the most up-to-date census bureau data. The problem is simple enough, get all the zip codes that fall within a radius input and a given zip code input. The great-circle distance formula stated, using simple trigonometry, let O1, LatLon 1, O2, LatLon2 be degree in radian , latitude, Longitude of two point delimited by radius R in miles, hence the distance D is

D=R*(arcos(cos(O1)*(os(O2)*(LatLon2-LatLon1)+ sin(O1) * sin(O2)

That’s assuming Earth is a perfect sphere. However Earth is an oblate spheroid because of it is flattens at its poles due to rotation, which makes the formula flawed. The zip code Radius proximity search algorithm is still in its development stages to improve accuracy and optimization. Most algorithm that seeks to achieved optimization often fails horribly in the worst case scenario where searching within a large radius with thousands of zip codes fall within the radius boundary would chock the database server if the data are not properly indexed. Many databases have spatial type that can handle latitudinal and longitudinal data which was engineered for spatial calculation.

ColdFusion is a tag based server language, its native reserve words always start with angle bracket “<” and the prefix “cf”. The tag to declare variables is “<cfset>”, since ColdFusion does not have implicit variables, variables must be declare explicitly with the “<cfset>”. This means that if you used a variable that was not first declared with the “<cfset>”, you will get a ColdFusion error stating the variable does not exist. A variable in computer programming languages is a memory address capable of holding anything. Since ColdFusion doesn’t define the data of variables, all values assigned to a variable is consider a string. Even a number is a string in ColdFusion variables. When computing numeric values there is a function called “IsNumeric()” which takes one parameter and determines if that parameter is numeric, and returns false if not numeric or true if it is a numeric  value. Also, there is another tag called “<cfparam>” which can be used to declare local variable scope variables in a ColdFusion Template. The “<cfparam>” tag is very useful because it declares the variable and assigns it a default value set by the programmer if the variable doesn’t already exist. This ensures no error occurred when the variable is being referenced in other parts of the application. A programmer can also write their code in Java-like or C++ like syntax just by using the <CFScript> tag.

A programmer has many options when it comes to writing their application.