LECTURE 02

EVOLUTION OF THE
PROGRAMMING
LANGUAGES
CSE 325/CSE 425:
CONCEPTS OF
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

INSTRUCTOR: DR. F. A. FAISAL

INTRO

•  We will not go through the in-depth discussion

of any language feature or concept.
•  However, we will discuss the development of a
collection of programming languages.
•  We will explores the environment in which each
was designed and focuses on the contributions
of the language and the motivation for its
development.
•  In short, It will be the history analysis.
HISTORY AND EVALUATION OF
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
GENEALOGY OF
COMMON LANGUAGES
GENEALOGY OF COMMON
LANGUAGES(CONT.)
MAJOR PROGRAMMING
LANGUAGES
•  Fortran
•  LISP
•  ALGOL 60
•  COBOL
•  Basic
•  PL/I
•  APL
•  SNOBOL
•  SIMULA 67
•  Others
FORTRAN
•  Is a general-purpose, imperative programming language
useful for numeric and scientific computing.
•  Designed for IBM 704, which consists of index registers and
floating point hardware.
•  Hence, no floating-point software
•  run (# sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_string) (it’s dual core)
FORTRAN I: 1957 (FIRST
IMPLEMENTED VERSION)
•  Environment of development
•  Applications were focused on only scientific computations.
•  Computers had small memories, slow and unreliable.
•  No programming methodology or tools.
•  Machine efficiency was the most important concern.
•  Impact of environment on design of Fortran I
•  No need for dynamic storage
•  Need good array handling and counting loops
•  No string handling, decimal arithmetic or powerful input/
output (for business software).
FORTRAN I OVERVIEW
•  Names could have up to six characters
•  Post-test counting loop (Do)
•  Formatted I/O
•  User-defined subprograms
•  Three-way selection statement (arithmetic IF)
•  No data typing statements
•  No separate compilation
•  Code is very fast
•  Quickly become widely used
•  Compiler released in April 1957, after 18 worker-years of effort!
•  More than 400 codes of programs rarely compiled correctly,
mainly due to the reliability of 704.
FORTRAN (VERSIONS)
•  Fortran II: 1958
•  Fixed the bugs of Fortran I
•  Independent compilation of subroutines (allows the shortened
compilation process and made it possible to write larger programs).
•  Fortran III:
•  Fortran III was developed, but was never widely distributed.
•  Fortran IV: 1960-62
•  Most widely used programming language at that time.
•  Explicit type declarations for variables.
•  Capability of passing subprograms as parameters to other
subprograms.
•  Fortran 77: 1978
•  Became the new standard
•  Character string handling
•  Logical loop control statement
•  IF-THEN-ELSE statement
FORTRAN (VERSIONS)
•  Fortran 90: 1990
•  Most significant changes from Fortran 77
•  Modules
•  Dynamic arrays
•  Pointers
•  Recursion
•  Case statement
•  Parameter type checking
•  Fortran 95
•  minor additions, plus some deletions
•  Fortran 2003
•  Support for OOP, procedure pointers, interoperability with C
•  Fortran 2008
•  Blocks for local scopes, co-arrays, Do Concurrent, parallel execution
model
EXAMPLE
 LISP: FUNCTIONAL
PROGRAMMING
•  List-processing language
•  Designed at MIT by McCarthy
•  Al research needed a language
to
•  Process data in lists (rather
than arrays)
•  Symbolic computation (rather
than numeric)
•  Only two data types: atoms and
lists
•  Syntax is based on lambda
calculus.
Representing the lists (A B C D)
and (A (B C) D (E (F G)))
 LISP EVALUATION
•  P i o n e e r e d functional
programming
•  No need for variables or
assignment
•  Control via recursion and
conditional expressions
•  Still the dominant language
for AI
•  ML, Haskell, and F# are also
functional programming
languages, but use very
different syntax
ALGOL 60
•  Environment of development:
•  Fortran had arrived for IBM 70x
•  Many other languages were being developed, all for
specific machines.
•  No portable language; all were machine- dependent.
•  No universal language for communicating algorithms
•  Goal:
•  Close to mathematical notation
•  Good for describing algorithms
•  Must be translatable to machine code
ALGOL 58
•  Concept of data type was formalized.
•  Names could have any length size.
•  Arrays could have any number of subscripts.
•  Parameters were separated by mode (in & out)
•  Subscripts were placed in brackets
•  Compound statements (begin … end)
•  Semicolon as a statement separator
•  Assignment operator was :=
•  If has an else-if clause
•  No I/O- “ would make it machine dependent”
ALGOL 58
IMPLEMENTATION

•  Not meant to be implemented, but variations of it were

(MAD, JOVIAL) (JOVIAL was the official scientific
language for the U.S. Air Force for quarter century).
•  Although IBM was initially enthusiastic, all support was
dropped by mid 1959.
ALGOL 60 OVERVIEW
•  Modified ALGOL 58 at 6-day meeting in Paris
•  New features-
•  Block structure (local scope)
•  Two Parameter passing methods (pass by value and pass
by name).
•  Pass by name behave like a literal text-substitution.
•  Subprogram recursion
•  Stack-dynamic arrays

•  Still no I/O and no string handling.

•  Never widely used, especially for U.S.
EXAMPLE
COBOL (COMPUTERIZING
BUSINESS RECORDS)
•  Development of business applications-
•  UNIVAC was beginning to use FLOW-MATIC (is a compiled
language for business application) and not allowed as open
source.
•  USAF use the AIMACO
•  IBM was developing COMTRAN.
•  COBOL Historical Backgrounds-
•  Based on FLOW-MATIC
•  FLOW-MATIC features-
•  Names up to 12 characters, with embedded hyphens
•  English names for arithmetic operators (no arithmetic
expressions)
•  Data and code were completely separate.
•  The first word in every statement was a verb.
COBOL DESIGN
PROCESS
•  First design meeting (Pentagon) – May 1959
•  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.
•  Contributions
•  First macro facility in a high-level language
•  Hierarchical data structures (records)
•  Nested selection statements
•  Long names (up to 30 characters), with hyphens
•  Separate data division.
EXAMPLE
THE BEGINNING OF
TIMESHARING: BASIC
•  Designed by Kemeny & Kurtz at Dartmouth
•  Design Goals:
•  Easy to learn and use for non-science students
•  Must be “Pleasant and friendly”
•  Fast turnaround for homework
•  Free and private access
•  User time is more important than computer time
•  Current popular dialect: Visual Basic
•  First widely used language with time sharing.
EXAMPLE
PL/I
•  Is a procedural, imperative programming language
designed for scientific engineering, business and system
programming.
•  Designed by IBM
•  Background: by 1963
•  Scientific users began to need more elaborate I/O, like
COBOL had, business users began to need floating point
and arrays for MIS.
•  It looked like many shops would begin to need two kinds of
computers, languages, and support staff– (Damn Costly)
•  The solution:
•  Build a new computer to do both kinds of applications
•  Design a new language to do both kinds of applications.
PL/I
•  Design Process:
•  Designed in five months by 3 X 3 Committee
•  Three from IBM, 3 from SHARE
•  Initial Concept
•  An extension of Fortran IV
•  Initially called as NPL (New Programming Language)
•  Name changed to PL/I in 1965
•  Contributions:
•  First unit-level concurrency
•  First exception handling
•  Switch-selectable recursion
•  First pointer data type
•  First array cross sections
•  Concerns:
•  Many new features were poorly designed
•  Too large and too complex
TWO EARLY DYNAMIC
LANGUAGES: APL AND SNOBOL
•  Characterized by dynamic typing and dynamic storage
allocation
•  Variables are untyped-
•  A variable acquires a type when it is assigned a value.
•  Storage is allocated to a variable when it is assigned a
value. (Because before that there is no way to know the
the amount of storage that will be needed).
•  APL (A Programming Language)
•  Designed as a hardware description language at IBM by
Ken Iverson around 1960.
•  Highly expressive (many operators, for both scalars and
arrays of various dimensions)
•  Programs are very difficult to read.
•  Still in use, minimal changes
TWO EARLY DYNAMIC
LANGUAGES: APL AND SNOBOL

•  SNOBOL:
•  Designed as a string manipulation language at Bell Labs
by Farber, Griswold, and Polensky in 1964
•  Powerful operators for string pattern matching.
•  Slower than alternative languages (and thus no longer
used for writing editors).
•  Still used for certain text processing tasks.
THE BEGINNING OF DATA
ABSTRACTION: SIMULA 67

•  Designed primarily for system simulation in Norway by

Nygaard and Dahl
•  Based on ALGOL 60 and SIMULA !
•  Primary Contributions-
•  Co-routines- a kind of Subprogram
•  Classes, objects and inheritance
TOP PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE IN 2020
THANKS