Text 15. Programming Languages

A programming language in computer science is an artificial language used for writing a sequence of instructions. Similar to natural languages, such as English, French, programming languages have a vocabulary, grammar and syntax. However, natural languages are not suited for programming, because they are ambiguous, meaning that their vocabulary and grammatical structure may be interpreted in multiple ways. The languages used for programming must have simple logical structures, and the rules for their grammar, spelling and punctuation must be precise.

Programming languages can be classified as low-level and high-level languages. Examples of high-level languages are COBOL (Common business oriented language, used for commercial purposes, was first introduced in 1959), PASCAL and FORTRAN (used for solving scientific and mathematical problems, 1954, the USA), BASIC (Beginner’s all purpose symbolic instruction code, developed in 1965 at Dartmouth College in the USA for students who require a simple language to begin programming).

C is a programming language developed by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories in 1972 to support the UNIX OS. C is a compiled language that contains a small set of built-in functions that are machine dependent.

C++ is a general purpose programming language; it was developed by Biorn Straustrup in 1979 at Bell Laboratories as an enhancement to the C programming language and was initially named “C with Classes”. It was renamed to C++ in 1983. It is widely used in the software industry.

Java is a programming language developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems’ Java platform. Its original name was OAK. It was used for writing client’s applications and server software.

PACAL is a high-level general purpose programming language. It’s one of the most famous languages and is widely used in industrial programming as well as in teaching programming at high school. This language is a base for a great number of other languages. It was designed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth. The most famous version of PASCAL is TURBO PASCAL.

C# was developed by Microsoft as part of the. NET initiative and later approved as a standard by ECMA. It has an object-oriented syntax based on C++ and is heavy influenced by Java.