environment

Noun

environment (plural environments)

1. The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.
2. The natural world or ecosystem.
3. All the elements over which a designer has no control and that affect a system or its inputs and outputs.
4. A particular political or social setting, arena or condition.
5. (computing) The software and/or hardware existing on any particular computer system.

   That program uses the Microsoft Windows environment.

6. (programming) The environment of a function at a point during the execution of a program is the set of identifiers in the function's scope and their bindings at that point.

Related terms

• environ
• environmentalist
• environmentalism

In general, environment refers to the surroundings of an object.

Environment may refer to:

• The natural environment, all living and non-living things that occur naturally on Earth
• Built environment, constructed surroundings that provide the setting for human activity, ranging from the large-scale civic surroundings to the personal places
• Environment (biophysical), the physical and biological factors along with their chemical interactions that affect an organism
• Environment (systems), the surroundings of a physical system that may interact with the system by exchanging mass, energy, or other properties
• Environmental art
• Environmental determinism
• Environmental policy
• Environmental psychology
• Environmental quality
• Environmental science, the study of the interactions among the physical, chemical and biological components of the environment
• Environments (series) A series of LPs, cassettes and CDs depicting natural sounds
• Knowledge environment
• Social environment, the culture that an individual lives in, and the people and institutions with whom they interact

In computing:

• Desktop environment, in computing, the graphical user interface to the computer
• Environment variable, the set of environments defined in a process
• Integrated development environment, a type of computer software that assists computer programmers in developing software
• Runtime environment, a virtual machine state which provides software services for processes or programs while a computer is running