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1.2 Programming Domains

The document discusses various programming domains, highlighting their unique applications and associated languages. Scientific applications primarily used Fortran for efficient floating-point computations, while business applications utilized COBOL for reporting and data management. Artificial Intelligence programming began with Lisp and Prolog, and web software development incorporates a mix of markup and scripting languages like HTML and JavaScript.

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6 views4 pages

1.2 Programming Domains

The document discusses various programming domains, highlighting their unique applications and associated languages. Scientific applications primarily used Fortran for efficient floating-point computations, while business applications utilized COBOL for reporting and data management. Artificial Intelligence programming began with Lisp and Prolog, and web software development incorporates a mix of markup and scripting languages like HTML and JavaScript.

Uploaded by

colio
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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1.

2 Programming
Domains
Computers have been applied to a myriad of different areas, from controllingnuclear power
plants to providing video games in mobile phones. Because ofthis great diversity in
computer use, programming languages with very differentgoals have been developed. In
this section, we briefly discuss a few of the most common areas of computer applications
and their associated languages.

1.2.1 Scientific Applications


The first digital computers, which appeared in the late 1940s and early
1950s

 were invented and used for scientific applications.


 Typically, the scientific applications of that time used relatively simple
data structures, but required large numbers of floating-point arithmetic
computations.
 The most common data structures were arrays and matrices;
 the most common control structures were counting loops and
selections.

The early high-level programming languages

 invented for scientific applications were designed to provide for those


needs.
 Their competition was assembly language, so efficiency was a primary
concern.
 The first language for scientific applications was Fortran.
 For some scientific applications where efficiency is the primary
concern, such as those that were common in the 1950s and 1960s, no
subsequent language is significantly better than Fortran, which
explains why Fortran is still used.

1.2.2 Business Applications


 The use of computers for business applications began in the 1950s.
 Special computers were developed for this purpose, along with special
languages.
 The first successful high-level language for business was COBOL
(ISO/IEC,
 2002), the initial version of which appeared in 1960.

Business languages are characterized by facilities for producing

 elaborate reports,
 precise ways of describing and storing decimal numbers and character
data
 ability to specify decimal arithmetic operations.

There have been few developments in business application languages


outside the development and evolution of COBOL.

1.2.3 Artificial Intelligence


Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad area of computer applications
characterized by the use of symbolic rather than numeric computations.

Symbolic computation means that symbols, consisting of names rather than


numbers, are manipulated.

symbolic computation is more conveniently done with linked lists of data


rather than arrays.
This kind of programming sometimes requires more flexibility than other
programming domains.

The first widely used programming language developed for AI applications

was the functional language Lisp (McCarthy et al., 1965), which appeared in

1959.

During the early 1970s, however, an alternative approach to some of these


applications appeared—logic programming using the Prolog (Clocksin and
Mellish, 2013) language.

More recently, some AI applications have been written in systems languages


such as Python (Lutz, 2013).

1.2.4 Web Software


The World Wide Web is supported by an eclectic collection of languages
ranging from markup languages, such as HTML, which is not a programming
language, to general-purpose programming languages, such as Java.

Because of the pervasive need for dynamic Web content, some computation
capability

is often included in the technology of content presentation. This functionality


can be provided by embedding programming code in an HTML document.
Such code is often in the form of a scripting language, such as JavaScript

(Flanagan, 2011) or PHP (Tatroe et al., 2013). There are also some markup-
like

languages that have been extended to include constructs that control


document

processing.

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