IT2009

Evolution of the Major Programming Languages

Early Languages
• Plankalkül
• Pseudocodes
• IBM 704 and Fortran
• COBOL
• LISP
• Prolog

Plankalkül
• Means program calculus
• Developed by Konrad Zuse
• Includes mathematical expressions showing the relationships between program variables

Pseudocodes
• Have their own interpretative system for execution
• Were implemented through compiling routines
• Notable pseudocodes: Short Code (see figure), Speedcoding, The UNIVAC “Compiling” System

IBM 704 and Fortran

• The capabilities of IBM 704 prompted the development of Fortran (derived from Formula Translation).
• Fortran is a general-purpose imperative programming language created for numeric computation and
scientific computing.
• Fortran versions: Fortran I, Fortran II, Fortran III, IBM 1401 Fortran, Fortran IV, Fortran 66, Fortran 77,
Fortran 90, Fortran 95, Fortran 2003, and Fortran 2008
• Fortran’s environment was developed based on the following ideas:
o Computers had small memories and were slow and relatively unreliable.
o The primary use of computers was for scientific computations.
o There were no existing efficient and effective way to program computers.
o Because of the high cost of computers compared to the cost of programmers, the speed of
the generated object code was the primary goal of the first Fortran compilers.

COBOL
• Stands for Common Business Oriented Language
• Developed by CODASYL Committee (Conference on Data System Languages) in 1960
• Designed for developing business, typically file-oriented applications
• Not designed for writing systems programs
• Characteristics:
o Self-documenting
o Non-proprietary
o Maintainable

LISP
• Stands for List Processor
• Developed by John McCarthy in the 1950s
• First functional programming language that was intended to provide language features for list
processing
• Used in applications for artificial intelligence
• 2 Dialects of LISP: Scheme and Common LISP

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• Significant Features:
o 2 Types of Data Structures:
 Atoms – similar to identifiers, but can also be numeric constants
 Lists – can be lists of atoms, lists, or any combination of the two
o Functional Programming Style: All computations are performed by applying functions to
arguments.
o Uniform Representation of Data and Code
Example: the list (A B C D)
o Reliance on Recursion
o Garbage Collection

Scheme
• Emerged in the mid-1970s
• Invented by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman
• Characterized by its small size, its treatment of functions as first-class entities, and its exclusive use of
static scoping
• Static Scoping (Lexical Scoping) – a convention used with many programming languages that set the
scope (range of functionality) of a variable so that it may only be referenced from within the block of
code in which it is defined

Common LISP
• Developed in the early 1980s
• Designed by combining the features of several dialects of LISP
• Allows both static scoping and dynamic scoping
• Dynamic scoping – creates variables that can be called from outside the block of code in which they
are defined

Prolog
• Derived from Programming Logic
• Designed by Alain Colmerauer, Phillippe Roussel, and Robert Kowalski in the early 1970s
• Prolog programs consist of collections of statements.
• The primary components are:
o A method for specifying predicate calculus propositions
o An implementation of a restricted form of resolution

ALGOL-Based Languages
• ALGOL
• BASIC
• PL/I
• Pascal
• C
• Ada

ALGOL
• Derived from Algorithmic Language
• Originally developed in the mid-1950s
• Designed specifically for programming scientific computations
• 3 Major Specifications: ALGOL 58, ALGOL 60, and ALGOL 68
• Characteristics: Block Structure, Parameter Passing, Structured Control Statements, Recursion,
Dynamic Arrays, Reserved Words, User-defined Data Types

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BASIC
• Stands for Beginner’s All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
• Originally designed as a teaching language by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz in the early 1960s
• Described as easy to learn, especially for the non-science oriented individuals
• Can be implemented on computers with small memory capacity
• First widely used language that was used through terminals connected to a remote computer

PL/I
• Derived from Programming Language I
• Introduced by IBM in the 1960s
• Represents the first large-scale attempt to design a language that could be used for various application
areas
• Included what were then considered the best parts of ALGOL 60 (recursion and block structure),
Fortran IV (separate compilation with communication through global data, and COBOL 60 (data
structures, I/O, report-generating facilities)
• The first programming language to have the following facilities:
o Programs were allowed to create concurrently executing subprograms.
o It was possible to detect and handle 23 different types of exceptions or runtime errors.
o Subprograms were allowed to be used recursively, but the capability could be disabled,
allowing more efficient linkage for non-recursive subprograms.
o Pointers were included as data type.
o Cross-sections of arrays could be referenced. For example, the third row of a matrix could be
referenced as if it were a single-dimensioned array.

Pascal
• Designed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth
• Named after Blaise Pascal
• Has been most useful as a teaching tool
• Used as a beginner’s programming language
• By the mid-1970s, it was the most widely used language for instruction.

C
• Originally developed by Dennis Ritchie in 1972
• Designed for systems programming
• Implemented in the UNIX operating system
• Has adequate control statements and data-structuring facilities to allow its use in many application
areas
• Has a rich set of operators that provide a high degree of expressiveness

Ada
• Developed for the US Department of Defense in the 1970s
• Derived from Augusta Ada Byron
• Improves code safety and maintainability by using the compiler to find errors in favor of runtime errors
• 4 Major Contributions:
o Packages in the Ada language provide the means for encapsulating data objects, specifications
for data types, and procedures.
o It includes extensive facilities for exception handling.
o Program units can be generic in Ada.
o It provides for concurrent execution of special program units, named tasks, using rendezvous
mechanism.

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Object-Oriented Languages
• Smalltalk
• C++
o Objective-C
o Delphi
o Go
• Visual Basic
• Java
• C#

Smalltalk
• Designed by Alan Kay and his team in the early 1970s
• The first programming language that fully supported object-oriented programming
• Its syntax makes use of messages, rather than arithmetic and logical expressions and conventional
control statements.

C++
• Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup in the 1980s as an evolution of the C programming language
• Has both functions and methods which enable it to support both procedural and object-oriented
programming
• Operators and methods can be overloaded.
• Supports multiple inheritance
• Includes exception handling (hardware-detectable exceptions cannot be handled)
• Languages related to C++:
o Objective-C
 Designed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s
 The only one to use the Smalltalk syntax among the programming languages that were
created by adding support for object-oriented programming to an imperative
language
o Delphi
 First appeared in 1995
 Designed by Anders Hejlsberg (Turbo Pascal developer)
 Created by adding object-oriented support to Pascal
 Less complex than C++ since it does not allow user-defined operator overloading,
generic subprograms, and parameterized classes
o Go
 Designed by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, and Robert Griesemer at Google in 2007
 Created to address the slowness of compilation of large C++ programs at Google
 Borrowed some of its syntax and constructs from C
 Some of the new features are:
• Data declarations are syntactically reversed from the other C-based
languages.
• Variables precede the type name.
• Variable declarations can be given a type by inference if the variable is given
an initial value.
• Functions can return multiple values.

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Visual Basic
• Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup in the 1980s as an evolution of the C programming language
• Event-driven programming language and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from Microsoft
• Engineered for productively building type-safe and object-oriented applications
• Enables developers to target Windows, Web, and mobile devices
• The drag-and-drop design for creating the UI is derived from a prototype form generator developed
by Alan Cooper and his company called Tripod.

Java
• Initially developed in the mid of 1990s to address the need for a programming language for consumer
electronic devices
• Became prevalent in the online world with the emergence of the World Wide Web
• Increased the level of interactions between the user and the application
• Can bring interest to Web pages through applications that can give the user immediate feedback and
accept user input continuously through mouse or keyboard entries
• Some features of Java are:
o It is a platform-independent language.
o It enhances interaction of clients (browsers) on the World Wide Web.
o It moves processing to the client and off the server.
o It is used to develop scalable Internet applications.
o Its specification is publicly available.
o It enables new forms of software distribution and upgrades.

C#
• Announced by Microsoft in 2000 and released in January 2002
• Based on C++ and Java but includes some ideas from Delphi and Visual Basic
• Design team is headed by Anders Hejlsberg (designed Turbo Pascal and Delphi).
• Its purpose is to provide a language for component-based software development, specifically for such
development in the .NET Framework.

References:

Sebesta, Robert W. (2012). Concepts of Programming Languages. 10th ed. USA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Ben-Ari, Mordechai (2006). Understanding Programming Languages. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Tucker, Allan B. and Noonan, Robert E. (2002). Programming Languages: Principles and Paradigms. 2nd ed.
New York: Mc-Graw Hill

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