Describe COBOL
Common Business Oriented Language
Who was the principal mentor
Grace Murray Hopper(1906-1992)
Cobol was based on and what features did it have
FLOW MATIC
Features:
* Names up to 12 characters, with embedded hyphens
* English names for arithmetic operators
* Data and code were completely separate
* Verbs were first word in every statemen
What were the design goals
- Must look like simple English
- Must be easy to use, even if that means it will be less powerful
- Must broaden the base of computer users
- Must not be biased by current compiler problems
What design problems did they have
Arithmetic expressions?
Subscripts
Fight among manufactures
Describe BASIC
- Beginner’s All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
- Designed by Kemeny & Kurtz at Dartmouth
Mention goals for BASIC
- Easy to learn and use for non-science students and as a path to
Fortran and Algol - Must be ”pleasant and friendly”
- Fast turnaround for homework
9 - Free and private access
- User time is more important than computer timE
Describe LISP
- LISt Processing language (Designed at MIT byJohn
McCarthy)
AI research needed a language that: - Process data in lists (rather than arrays)
- Symbolic computation (rather than numeric)
- Syntax is based on the lambda calculus
- No need for variables or assignment
- Control via recursion and conditional expressions
What is the status of LISP
Still the dominant language for AI
* COMMON LISP and Scheme are contemporary
dialects
* ML, Miranda, and Haskell are related languages
What were the successes behind Algo58
- It was the standard way to publish algorithms for over 20 years
- All subsequent imperative languages are based on it
- First machine-independent language
- First language whose syntax was formally defined (BNF)
What were the failures behind Algo60
- No i/o and the character set made
programs nonportable - Too flexible–hard to implement
- Entrenchment of FORTRAN
- Formal syntax description
- Lack of support of IBM
Describe APL
- designed by K.Iverson at Harvard in late
1950’s - A Programming Language
- A language for programming mathematical
computations
–especially those using matrices - Functional style and many whole array
operations - Drawback is requirement of special keyboard
Desribe PL/1
- PL/1 designed in 1963-4
– supposed to be all purpose
– combined features of FORTRAN, COBOL and Algol60 and
more!
– translators were slow, huge and unreliable
– some say it was ahead of its time……
Describe C
- Designed for systems programming at Bell Labs
by Dennis Richie and colleagues. - Evolved primarily from B, but also ALGOL 68
- Powerful set of operators, but poor type checking
- Initially spread through UNIX and the availability
of high quality, free compilers.
