2 evolution of the major programming languages

ICS 313 - Fundamentals of Programming Languages 1
2. Evolution of the Major Programming languages
Genealogy of Common Programming Lang.

2.1 Plankalkül - 1945
Never implemented
Advanced data structures
floating point, arrays, records
Invariants
Notation:
A[7] = 5 * B[6]
| 5 * B => A
V | 6 7 (subscripts)
S | 1.n 1.n (data types)
2.2 Pseudocodes - 1949
What was wrong with using machine code?
Poor readability
Poor modifiability
Expression coding was tedious
Machine deficiencies--no indexing or fl. pt.
Short code; 1949; BINAC; Mauchly
Expressions were coded, left to right
Some operations:
1n => (n+2)nd power
2n => (n+2)nd root
07 => addition
Speedcoding; 1954; IBM 701, Backus
Pseudo ops for arithmetic and math functions
Conditional and unconditional branching
Autoincrement registers for array access
Slow!
Only 700 words left for user program
Laning and Zierler System - 1953
Implemented on the MIT Whirlwind computer
First "algebraic" compiler system
Subscripted variables, function calls, expression translation
Never ported to any other machine

2.3 IBM 704 and FORTRAN
FORTRAN I - 1957
(FORTRAN 0 - 1954 - not implemented)
Designed for the new IBM 704, which had index
registers and floating point hardware
Environment of development:
Computers were small and unreliable
Applications were scientific
No programming methodology or tools
Machine efficiency was most important
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 (commercial stuff)
2.3 IBM 704 and FORTRAN (continued)
First implemented version of FORTRAN
Names could have up to six characters
Posttest counting loop (DO)
Formatted i/o
User-defined subprograms
Three-way selection statement (arithmetic IF)
No data typing statements
No separate compilation
Compiler released in April 1957, after 18 worker/years of effort
Programs larger than 400 lines rarely compiled correctly, mainly due to poor
reliability of the 704
Code was very fast
Quickly became widely used
FORTRAN II - 1958
Independent compilation
Fix the bugs

2.3 IBM 704 and FORTRAN (continued)
FORTRAN IV - 1960-62
Explicit type declarations
Logical selection statement
Subprogram names could be parameters
ANSI standard in 1966
FORTRAN 77 - 1978
Character string handling
Logical loop control statement
IF-THEN-ELSE statement
FORTRAN 90 - 1990
Modules
Pointers
Recursion
CASE statement
Parameter type checking
FORTRAN Evaluation
Dramatically changed forever the way
computers are used
2.4 LISP - 1959
LISt Processing language (Designed at MIT by McCarthy)
AI research needed a language that:
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
Pioneered functional programming
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, Miranda, and Haskell are related languages

2.5 ALGOL 58 and 60
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
ACM and GAMM met for four days for design
Goals of the language:
Close to mathematical notation
Good for describing algorithms
Must be translatable to machine code
2.5 ALGOL 58 and 60 (continued)
ALGOL 58 Language Features:
Concept of type was formalized
Names could have any length
Arrays could have any number of subscripts
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”
Comments:
Not meant to be implemented, but variations of it were (MAD, JOVIAL)
Although IBM was initially enthusiastic, all support was dropped by
mid-1959

2.5 ALGOL 58 and 60 (continued)
ALGOL 60
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
Successes:
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)
Failure:
Never widely used, especially in U.S.
Reasons:
No i/o and the character set made programs nonportable
Too flexible--hard to implement
Intrenchment of FORTRAN
Formal syntax description
Lack of support of IBM
2.6 COBOL - 1960
UNIVAC was beginning to use FLOW-MATIC
USAF was beginning to use AIMACO
IBM was developing COMTRAN
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
Verbs were first word in every statement
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
Design committee members were all from computer manufacturers and DoD branches
Design Problems: arithmetic expressions? subscripts? Fights among manufacturers

2.6 COBOL – 1960 (continued)
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
Comments:
First language required by DoD; would have failed
without DoD
Still the most widely used business applications language
2.7 BASIC - 1964
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

2.8 PL/I - 1965
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
By 1963, however,
Scientific users began to need more elaborate i/o, like COBOL had;
Business users began to need fl. pt. and arrays (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
2.8 PL/I (continued)
Designed in five months by the 3 X 3 Committee
PL/I contributions:
First unit-level concurrency
First exception handling
Switch-selectable recursion
First pointer data type
First array cross sections
Comments:
Many new features were poorly designed
Too large and too complex
Was (and still is) actually used for both
scientific and business applications

2.9 APL and SNOBOL
Characterized by dynamic typing and dynamic storage
allocation
APL (A Programming Language) 1962
Designed as a hardware description language (at IBM by Ken
Iverson)
Highly expressive (many operators, for both scalars and arrays
of various dimensions)
Programs are very difficult to read
SNOBOL(1964)
Designed as a string manipulation language (at Bell Labs by
Farber, Griswold, and Polensky)
Powerful operators for string pattern matching
2.10 SIMULA 67 - 1967
Designed primarily for system simulation
(in Norway by Nygaard and Dahl)
Based on ALGOL 60 and SIMULA I
Primary Contribution:
Coroutines - a kind of subprogram
Implemented in a structure called a class
Classes are the basis for data abstraction
Classes are structures that include both local data and
functionality
Objects and inheritance

2.11 ALGOL 68 - 1968
From the continued development of ALGOL 60, but it is not a
superset of that language
Design is based on the concept of orthogonality
Contributions:
User-defined data structures
Reference types
Dynamic arrays (called flex arrays)
Comments:
Had even less usage than ALGOL 60
Had strong influence on subsequent languages, especially
Pascal, C, and Ada
2.12 Important ALGOL Descendants
Pascal - 1971
Designed by Wirth, who quit the ALGOL 68 committee (didn't
like the direction of that work)
Designed for teaching structured programming
Small, simple, nothing really new
From mid-1970s until the late 1990s, it was the most widely
used language for teaching programming in colleges
C - 1972
Designed for systems programming (at Bell Labs by Dennis
Richie)
Evolved primarily from B, but also ALGOL 68
Powerful set of operators, but poor type checking
Initially spread through UNIX

2.12 Important ALGOL Descendants (co.)
Modula-2 mid-1970s (Wirth)
Pascal plus modules and some low-level features designed for
systems programming
Modula-3 -late 1980s (Digital & Olivetti)
Modula-2 plus classes, exception handling, garbage collection, and
concurrency
Oberon - late 1980s (Wirth)
Adds support for OOP to Modula-2
Many Modula-2 features were deleted (e.g., for statement,
enumeration types, with statement, noninteger array indices)
Delphi (Borland)
Pascal plus features to support OOP
More elegant and safer than C++
2.13 Prolog - 1972
Developed at the University of Aix-Marseille, by
Comerauer and Roussel, with some help from
Kowalski at the University of Edinburgh
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

2.14 Ada - 1983 (began in mid-1970s)
Huge design effort, involving hundreds of people, much money, and about eight years
Environment: More than 450 different languages being used for DOD embedded systems
(no software reuse and no development tools)
Contributions:
Packages - support for data abstraction
Exception handling - elaborate
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 95 (began in 1988)
Support for OOP through type derivation
Better control mechanisms for shared data (new concurrency features)
More flexible libraries
2.15 Smalltalk - 1972-1980
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 type binding)
Pioneered the graphical user interface everyone
now uses

2.16 C++ - 1985
Developed at Bell Labs by Stroustrup
Evolved from C and SIMULA 67
Facilities for object-oriented programming, taken partially from SIMULA 67, were
added to C
Also has exception handling
A large and complex language, in part because it supports both procedural and
OO programming
Rapidly grew in popularity, along with OOP
ANSI standard approved in November, 1997
Eiffel - a related language that supports OOP
(Designed by Bertrand Meyer - 1992)
Not directly derived from any other language
Smaller and simpler than C++, but still has most of the power
2.17 Java (1995)
Developed at Sun in the early 1990s
Based on C++
Significantly simplified (does not include struct, union, enum,
pointer arithmetic, and half of the assignment coercions of
C++)
Supports only OOP
Has references, but not pointers
Includes support for applets and a form of concurrency

2 evolution of the major programming languages

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2 evolution of the major programming languages