Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
ALGOL, Pascal, ADA, and Beyond
Although FORTRAN and COBOL were by far the most popular pro-
gramming languages developed in the United States during this period,
they were by no means the only ones to appear. Jean Sammet, editor of
one of the fi rst comprehensive treatments of the history of programming
languages, has estimated that by 1981, there were a least one thousand
programming languages in use nationwide. It would be impossible to
even enumerate, much less describe, the history and development of each
of these languages. Figure 4.3 contains a “genealogical” listing of some
of the more widely used programming languages developed prior to
1970. This section will focus on a few of the more historically signifi cant
alternatives to FORTRAN and COBOL.
More than a year before the Executive Committee of CODASYL
convened to discuss the need for a common business-oriented program-
ming language, an ad hoc committee of users, academics, and federal
offi cials met to study the possibility of creating a universal programming
language. This committee, which was brought together under the
auspices of the ACM, could not have been more different from the
group organized by CODASYL. Whereas the fi fteen-member Executive
Committee had contained only one university representative, the identi-
cally sized ACM-sponsored committee was dominated by academics. At
itsr fi rst meeting, this committee decided to follow the model of
FORTRAN in designing an algebraic language. FORTRAN itself was
not acceptable because of its association with IBM.
The ACM “universal language” project soon expanded into an
international initiative. Europeans in particular were deeply interested
in a language that would both transcend political boundaries and
help avoid the domination of Europe by the IBM Corporation. During
an eight-day meeting in Zurich, a rough specifi cation for the new
International Algebraic Language (IAL) was hashed out. Actually, three
distinct versions of the IAL were created: reference, publication, and
hardware. The reference language was the abstract representation of
the language as envisioned by the Zurich committee. The publication
and hardware languages would be isomorphic implementations of
the abstract reference language. Since these specifi c implementations
required careful attention to such messy details as character sets and
delimiters (decimal points being standard in the United States and
commas being standard in Europe), they were left for a later and unspeci-
fi ed date. The reference language was released in 1958 under the
