History of Programming Languages

Brian McNamara

Today's lecture will be a quick history of programming languages. Since 1957 when the first Fortran was introduced for the IBM 704, literally hundreds of new programming languages have come and gone--well, some of them have gone, and others--like Fortran, have managed to stay around. The sheer number of languages makes it impossible to cover them all in any depth--indeed, even the most important languages we will only have time to discuss in shallow detail today. As a result, we talk about only the most important languages--those that had historical significance either for their new ideas or their influences on the languages that followed them.

Let me admit, up front, that I am not a history buff. So why, you might ask, do we waste a day on a "history lecture" at all, then? Well, there are two major reasons. First, this lecture will give you a brief introduction to the handful of languages we'll talk about in this course. Thus the short exposure to these languages you get today will serve as the scaffolding onto which we'll learn about language constructs and the languages to which they belong. Second, I hope that in this discussion, especially of early languages, you'll gain an appreciation for the historical contexts in which languages have been developed. Things we take for granted today--like interactive machines, standard keyboards and characters sets, etc., were (of course) not always around, and it is interesting to see how issues that no longer matter today played important roles back then. By understanding the differences between the historical contexts in which different languages were created, only then can we appreciate that we are, today, right now, framed in a computing context that, when viewed from 20 or 30 years from now, will probably seem like we are focusing on issues of perhaps trivial importance, and missing some big issues.

So, those goals in mind, let's talk about history. On page 39 of your book, there's a beautiful picture showing a timeline of languages, with a dot for each major language, and lines connecting languages that influenced other ones. Had I made any overheads for today, this would have been the primary one. (As I mentioned; I'm a little disorganized this week; by next I'll have some slides prepared before lecture.) I'm going to talk about a few of these languages and draw part of that diagram on the board; you needn't copy it as it's right from your textbook.

FORTRAN

Computing in 1957 was largely scientific number crunching. Much hardware supported either integer operations, which floating point could be simulated on, or only floating point operations. IBM introduced its new IBM 704, which supported both integer and floating point operations, and this is the language on which the first successful programming language, Fortran, was built.

The idea for FORTRAN had been in the works for some time. The language compiler was advertised as one that would generate object code that was as efficient as hand-coded machine code, but the ease of the existing

interpretive pseudo-code systems. Amazingly, FORTRAN did just that, and a new era of programming was born.

What was the language like? FORTRAN could use variables whose names were up to six characters long. It had both integers and floating point variables (based on the name: I-N integers). It had formatted input and output statements, to read and write data. It had an arithmetic IF statement, which compares two numbers and then branches to one of three locations depending on less than, greater than, or equal to. And it had an iterative DO loop which would count from one number to another.

All of the control statements in the language mapped directly into single instructions in the hardware of the IBM 704.

Largely due to support from IBM, FORTRAN was the most used language in computing for the next 25 years or so. It was revised in 1977 and again in 1990, adding lots of modern features to the language (like type declarations and if-then-else).

LISP

A couple years later, on the complete other end of the spectrum came LISP. LISP was a dynamic, interpreted language. It features data stored in linked lists (that was garbage collected) and programs that were represented just as data--in lists. A list like (A B C) could be treated as data, or as a function call A(B,C). LISP was functional-there were no variables or destructive assignment. Scheme and Common LISP are the main dialects that survive today.

Algol

In the late fifties, the computing world was interested in creating a "universal language" for programming. FORTRAN was the only existing contender, but it was IBM property. The ACM in the US, and GAMM in Germany both decided to form committees to create a machine-independent, universal language. The committees got together in 1958 and drafted the first version of Algol. Two years later after some experimentation and suggestions, another meeting was held, and Algol 60 was born.

Algol 60 is arguably the most influential language of all time. Among the contributions of Algol to the computing world:

variable := expression

blocks (begin-end pairs which are modules and scopes)

two different parameter passing mechanisms (value and name)

stack-dynamic arrays

type declarations

if-then-else with compound statements (no labels)

the FOR loop (without labels)

context-free grammars as a method for describing a language

Algol was never used as much as Fortran, but for about 25 years it was the language to communicate algorithms. Pick up Communications of the ACM (show magazine) in the 1960s and you'd see Algol everywhere.

COBOL

Most computing in FORTRAN or Algol was scientific in nature. COBOL was designed for business. It was to be a simple enough language for managers to

read and write, and capable of producing printed reports and doing decimal number processing. It read very much like English, with long keywords and identifiers. Perhaps COBOL's most important contribution was that of the record for organizing data that belonged together. COBOL has some government backing, which helped it gain popularity.

PL/I

The kitchen sink, PL/I combined the features of Algol, Fortran, and COBOL, as well as some new features, like concurrency and exception handling. It failed, showing that a large feature set doesn't necessarily make a good language.

BASIC

BASIC was the first language to be designed for use on timesharing, interactive terminals. It was the first language which considered programmer time more valuable than computer time. This was revolutionary for that time.

Simula 67

Simula was for the most part a superset of Algol, and contributed the class, the first step towards data abstraction. Simula was used for simulations, and the class-as-data-abstraction concept wasn't recognized and appreciated until years later.

Algol 68

Algol 68 is orthogonal--almost any feature can be combined with any other feature in a meaningful way. For example, an if-then-else statement could appear on either side of an assignment statement. For the most part, this flexibility made things too complicated; few used the language.

Pascal

Pascal was an Algol descendant designed as a language for teaching algorithms. Meaningful contributions included in Pascal were the case (switch) statement, and value-result (in/out) parameters. Pascal was used in education everywhere for about 20 years, and it replaced Algol as the language for the communication of algorithms in journals. Its simplicity (part of its design) made it not powerful/useful enough to use in practice much.

C

C evolved from a series of prior language into a portable systems language. C has strong influences from Algol 68; C is very orthogonal. C was strongly coupled to the UNIX operating system, which helped its growth.

Smalltalk 80

Smalltalk, based on Simula, is the first truly object-oriented language. Classes have instances, and all computation is expressed as messages sent to an object. Smalltalk is remarkable not only for OO, but also for its programming environment. Smalltalk relies on a windowed interface and a pointing device.

Ada

Ada is the result of the largest language design ever. It was contracted by the US Department of Defense as a language which embedded systems could be reliably and efficiently programmed. A long series of requirements docs were made for Ada, and then four companies designed languages, and the best was chosen. The first Ada compiler took years to develop--it was written in Ada.

Ada contributed packages as a way to encapsulate data objects and specify data types. Ada provides good exception handling facilities, for detecting and recovering from software and hardware exceptions. Ada has generics, which allow code to be reused with many different data types. Ada also provides a decent concurrency mechanism. Ada was heavily influenced by Pascal. A recent revision, Ada 95, has OO.

C++

C++ was created as an extension to C to support OO. It was designed to be compatible with C and as efficient as it. It was also designed with the intent to provide a transition path for programmers moving from traditional structured programming to OO programming. C++ included public/private access, multiple inheritance, constructors and destructors, and operator overloading. Leveraging off the success of C, C++ became a popular commercial language.

Eiffel

Eiffel was designed as a language with expressivity and power equal to C++, but with much greater readability and write ability due to simplicity and single-minded design in the language. Eiffel also includes the idea of enforcing assertions via interface contracts. Commercial issues have prevented Eiffel from becoming a major success.

FORTRAN (1957)

| \ LISP (1959)

| \

| Algol (1960) COBOL (1960)

\ | | \ /

\| | \ /

______| \ | /\

| | PL/I (1964) \----------------

| | \ |

| BASIC (1965) SIMULA (1967) |

| / | \ |

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