Other High-Level Languages

Although hundreds of high-level languages have been developed, only a few have achieved broad acceptance other than those we've discussed.

Fortran

IBM Corporation developed Fortran (FORmula TRANslator) in the mid-1950s to create scientific and engineering applications that require complex mathematical computations. Fortran is still widely used.

COBOL

COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) was developed in 1959 by a group of computer manufacturers in conjunction with government and industrial computer users. COBOL is used primarily for commercial applications that require the precise and efficient manipulation of large amounts of data. Much of today's business software is still programmed in COBOL.

Pascal

During the 1960s, many large software-development efforts encountered severe difficulties. People began to realize that software development was a far more complex activity than they had imagined. Research activity resulted in the evolution of structured programminga disciplined approach to creating programs that are clear, demonstrably correct and easy to modify. One of the results of this research was the development of the Pascal programming language by Professor Niklaus Wirth in 1971. Pascal, named after the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, was designed for teaching structured programming in academic environments and rapidly became the preferred introductory programming language in most colleges. Unfortunately, the language lacked many features needed to make it useful in commercial, industrial and government applications. By contrast, C, which also arose from research on structured programming, did not have the limitations of Pascal, and programmers quickly adopted it instead.

Ada

The Ada programming language was developed under the sponsorship of the U. S. Department of Defense (DOD) through the early 1980s. DOD wanted a single language that would meet its needs. The language was named after Lady Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Lady Lovelace is generally credited with writing the world's first computer program, in the early 1800s (for the Analytical Engine mechanical computing device designed by Charles Babbage). An important capability of Ada is multitasking, which allows programmers to specify that many activities are to occur in parallel. As we will see in Chapter 15, C# offers a similar capability, called multithreading.