CS320/03 Evolution of Major Languages.
- Check the schedule and syllabus on the WWW site.
- Read Warnings below.
- Study chapter 2
- Try answering the Review Questions at the end chapter 2.
- Bring written questions+answers to 2 of these review questions to class. You can do more if you want. Your graded questions and answers can be used in the final.
Table
| Previous 02 Preliminaries | Study handouts + Chapter 1 | lab02 HTML home page |
| 03 Evolution of Main Languages | Chapter 2 | lab03 HTML lab pages |
| Next 04 Syntax: grammars, EBNF, parsing | Chapter 3 sections 1 to 3 + Chapter 4 sections 1 to 3 + XBNF |
(Close Table)
Assigned work due
Warnings
C++
In Chapter 2, Figure 2.1 are a little misleading. They give the impression that C++ was finished in the 1980's and ANSI C was derived from C++. In fact, C++ was developed from C in parallel with ANSI C and collected several ideas from ANSI C. The early C++ did not have much effect on ANSI C. ANSI C was completed in 1989. C++ continued to develop until 1998. ANSI C++ was drafted in 1997. ANSI/ISO C++ was finished in 1998. See the diagram below:
COBOL
I've never known a real COBOL programmer who wrote "PICTURE IS". We all wrote the shorter "PIC". We always omitted stuff like "IS". Nobody wrote "LABEL RECORDS ARE STANDARD" and "RECORD SIZE IS <blah>". The compiler worked these out for us.
Ada
My memory of the Ada design process was that both PL/1 and Pascal where used as the basis of the early designs. Certainly PL/I was the basis of one of the 17 early designs even if it didn't make it into the final four.
APL
The book omits a later development! APL finally escaped the "IBM Golf Ball with Greek letters" environment. There is language called J [ wiki?JayLanguage ] that is the direct descendent of APL that works on ASCII/DOS systems.