IBU
International Burch University
CEN 332 Programming Languages
Lecture 2 – Evolution of Major Programming Languages
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Zerina Mašetić
Agenda
Zuse’s Plankalkül
The IBM 704 and Fortran
Functional Programming: LISP
The First Step Toward Sophistication: ALGOL 60
Computerizing Business Records: COBOL
The Beginnings of Timesharing: BASIC
Everything for Everybody: PL/I
Agenda
The Beginnings of Data Abstraction: SIMULA 67
Orthogonal Design: ALGOL 68
Some Early Descendants of the ALGOLs
Programming Based on Logic: Prolog
History’s Largest Design Effort: Ada
Object-Oriented Programming: Smalltalk
Combining Imperative and Object-Oriented Features: C++
An Imperative-Based Object-Oriented Language: Java
Scripting Languages
Zuse’s Plankalkül
Designed in 1945, but not published until 1972
Never implemented
Advanced data structures: floating point, arrays, records
Invariants (a function which remains unchanged when a specified transformation is applied.)
Plankalkül Syntax
The simplest data type in Plankalkül was the single bit.
Integer and floating-point numeric types were built from the bit type.
Plankalkül included arrays and records (called structs in the C-based languages)
IBM 704 and Fortran
Fortran 0: 1954 - not implemented
Fortran I:1957
Designed for the new IBM 704, which had index registers and floating point hardware
This led to the idea of compiled programming languages, because there was no place to hide the cost
of interpretation (no floating-point software)
Development environment
Computers were small and unreliable
Applications were scientific
No programming methodology or tools
Machine efficiency was the most important concern
IBM 704
IBM 704 was programmed in
Fortran language
• had a 36 bit binary word as it’s
data
• Each 36-bit computer
instruction contained 1 or 2
address fields of 15 bits, so that
the full 32K, 36-bit word
memory could be addressed
directly.
The 704 Main Console (Lee Jennings)
IBM 704
64K Magnetic core memory stacks ((Lee Jennings)
Fortran I Overview
First implemented version of Fortran
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
Fortran I Overview
First implemented version of Fortran
No separate compilation
Compiler released in April 1957
Programs larger than 400 lines rarely compiled correctly mainly due to poor reliability of 704
Fortran II
Distributed in 1958
Independent compilation
Fixed the bugs
Fortran IV
Evolved during 1960-62
Explicit type declarations
Logical selection statement
Subprogram names could be parameters
Fortran 77
Became the new standard in 1978
Character string handling
Logical loop control statement
IF-THEN-ELSE statement
Fortran 90
Most significant changes from Fortran 77
Modules
Dynamic arrays
Pointers
Recursion
CASE statement
Parameter type checking
Latest versions of Fortran
Fortran 95 – relatively minor additions, plus some deletions
Fortran 2003 – suppport for OOP, procedure pointers, interoperability with C
Fortran 2008 – blocks for local scopes, co-arrays, Do Concurrent
Fortran 95
Functional Programming: LISP
LISt Processing language
Designed at MIT by McCarthy
AI research needed a language to
Process data in lists (rather than arrays)
Symbolic computation (rather than numeric)
Only two data types: atoms and lists
Representation of Two LISP Lists
Representing the lists (A B C D) and (A (B C) D (E (F G)))
LISP Evaluation
Pioneered functional programming language
No need for variables or assignment
Control via recursion and conditional expressions
Still the dominant language for AI
COMMON LISP and Scheme are contemporary dialects of LISP
ML, Haskell, and F# are also functional programming languages, but use very different
syntax
Lisp
The First Step Toward Sophistication:
ALGOL 60
Environment of development
FORTRAN had (barely) 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
The First Step Toward Sophistication:
ALGOL 60
ALGOL 60 was the result of efforts to design a universal language
ACM and GAMM met for four days for design (May 27 to June 1, 1958)
Goals of the language
Close to mathematical notation
Good for describing algorithms
Must be translatable to machine code
ALGOL 58
Concept of type was formalized
Names could be any length
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 had an else-if clause
No I/O - “would make it machine dependent”
ALGOL 60 Overview
Modified ALGOL 58 at 6-day meeting in Paris
New features
Block structure (local scope)
Two parameter passing methods
Subprogram recursion
Stack-dynamic arrays
still no I/O and no string handling
ALGOL 60 Evaluation
First machine-independent language
First language whose syntax was formalized
Never widely used, especially in U.S.
Lack of I/O and the character set made programs non-portable
Too flexible--hard to implement
Lack of support from IBM
Computerizing Business Records: COBOL
COBOL: common business-oriented language
compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use
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
Computerizing Business Records: COBOL
Design committee members were all from computer manufacturers and DoD branches
It was created as part of a US Department of Defense effort to create a portable
programming language for data processing.
The Beginning of Timesharing: BASIC
Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
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
BASIC
Everything for Everybody: PL/I
Designed by IBM and SHARE
Computing situation in 1964 (IBM's point of view)
Scientific computing
IBM 1620 and 7090 computers
FORTRAN
SHARE user group
Business computing
IBM 1401, 7080 computers
COBOL
GUIDE user group
PL/I: 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--too costly
The obvious 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 the 3 X 3 Committee: three members from IBM, three
members from SHARE
Initial concept: an extension of Fortran IV
Initially called NPL (New Programming Language)
Name changed to PL/I in 1965
PL/I: Evaluation
PL/I contributions
First unit-level concurrency
First exception handling
Switch-selectable recursion
First pointer data type
Concerns
Many new features were poorly designed
Too large and too complex
The Beginning of Data Abstraction:
SIMULA 67
Designed primarily for system simulation in Norway by Nygaard and
Dahl
Based on ALGOL 60 and SIMULA I
Coroutines - a kind of subprogram
Classes, objects, and inheritance
Orthogonal Design: ALGOL 68
Contributions
User-defined data structures
Reference types
Dynamic arrays (called flex arrays)
Comments
Less usage than ALGOL 60
Had strong influence on subsequent languages, especially Pascal, C, and Ada
Pascal - 1971
Developed by Wirth (a former member of the ALGOL 68 committee)
Designed for teaching structured programming
Small, simple, nothing really new
Largest impact was on teaching programming
From mid-1970s until the late 1990s, it was the most widely used language for teaching
programming
Pascal
C - 1972
Designed for systems programming (at Bell Labs by Dennis Richie)
Powerful set of operators, but poor type checking
Though designed as a systems language, it has been used in many application areas
C
Programming Based on Logic: Prolog
Based on formal logic
Non-procedural
Can be summarized as being an intelligent database system that uses an inferencing
process to infer the truth of given queries
Comparatively inefficient
Few application areas
Prolog
History’s Largest Design Effort: Ada
The Ada language was developed for the Department of Defense (DoD)
Huge design effort, involving hundreds of people, much money, and about eight years
Named Ada after Augusta Ada Byron, the first programmer
Ada Evaluation
Contributions
Packages - support for data abstraction
Exception handling
Generic program units
Concurrency - through the tasking model
Comments
Competitive design
Included all that was then known about software engineering and language design
First compilers were very difficult; the first really usable compiler came nearly five years after the
language design was completed
Ada
Ada
Ada 95
Ada 95 (began in 1988)
Support for OOP through type derivation
Better control mechanisms for shared data
New concurrency features
More flexible libraries
Ada 2005
Interfaces and synchronizing interfaces
Popularity suffered because the DoD no longer requires its use but also because of
popularity of C++
Object-Oriented Programming:
Smalltalk
Developed at Xerox PARC, initially by Alan Kay, later by Adele Goldberg
First full implementation of an object-oriented language (data abstraction,
inheritance, and dynamic binding)
Pioneered the graphical user interface design
Promoted OOP
Smalltalk
Combining Imperative and Object-Oriented
Programming: C++
Developed at Bell Labs in 1980
Evolved from C and SIMULA 67
Facilities for object-oriented programming, taken partially from SIMULA 67
A large and complex language, in part because it supports both procedural and OO
programming
Rapidly grew in popularity along with OOP
Related OOP Languages
Objective-C (designed by Brad Cox – early 1980s)
C plus support for OOP based on Smalltalk
Uses Smalltalk s ’s method calling syntax
Used by Apple for systems programs
Delphi
Pascal plus features to support OOP
More elegant and safer than C++
Go (designed at Google - 2009)
Loosely based on C, but also quite different
Does not support traditional OOP
An Imperative-Based Object-Oriented
Language: Java
Developed at Sun in the early 1990s
C and C++ were not satisfactory for embedded electronic devices
Based on C++
Significantly simplified (does not include struct, union, enum, pointer arithmetic, and half of the
assignment of C++)
Supports only OOP
Has references, but not pointers
Includes support for applets and a form of concurrency
Java Evaluation
Eliminated many unsafe features of C++
Supports concurrency
Libraries for applets, GUIs, database access
Portable: Java Virtual Machine concept
Widely used for Web programming
Use increased faster than any previous language
Java
Java
Scripting Languages for the Web
Perl
Designed by Larry Wall—first released in 1987
Variables are statically typed but implicitly declared
Three distinctive namespaces, denoted by the first character of a
variable’s name
All scalar variable names begin with dollar signs ($),
All array names begin with at signs (@), and
All hash names begin with percent signs (%)
Scripting Languages for the Web
Perl
Scripting Languages for the Web
JavaScript
Began at Netscape, but later became a joint venture of Netscape and Sun Microsystems
A client-side HTML-embedded scripting language, often used to create dynamic HTML
documents
Purely interpreted
Related to Java only through similar syntax
Scripting Languages for the Web
PHP
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, designed by Rasmus Lerdorf
A server-side HTML-embedded scripting language often used for form,
processing and database access through the Web
Purely interpreted syntax
Scripting Languages for the Web
Python
An OO interpreted scripting language
Supports lists tuples and hashes
Scripting Languages for the Web
Ruby
Designed in Japan by Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a, “Matz”)
Began as a replacement for Perl and Python
A pure object-oriented scripting language
All data are objects
Most operators are implemented as methods, which can be redefined by user code
Purely interpreted
Scripting Languages for the Web
Lua
An OO interpreted scripting language
Supports lists tuples and hashes all with its single data structure
Easily extendable
TASK:
Select one of the programming languages listed below:
Perl
Algol 60
Simula 67
Go
Delphi
FLOW-MATIC
COBOL 60
Scheme
C#
Lua
Haskell
Prolog
TASK:
Explore it and find out following:
When was it developed, by whom, why there was a need for it, what were the main features of it,
how the syntax looked like.
