Programming languages can be low level or high level. Low level languages consist of the simple instructions that are fed to the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer; they are efficient from the computer's point of view, but arduous to write from the programmer's point of view.
It is easier to program in high level languages; they allow the programmer to express what he(she) wants to do more straightforwardly. The high level language is similar on different computers (with different CPUs), a compiler for turns any program into the low level language of the CPU of the computer that is being used. Hence programs in high level languages are portable between different computers, progams in low level languages are not.
Fortran was the first popular programming language, originating in the
1950s. Its main feature
was that it was a procedure-oriented language.
Fortran nad developed over a number of standards;
Fortran 77 (circa 1977) was superceded in the 1990s
by Fortran 90 and Fortran 95.
More details ,
Books on Fortran
Algol went a step further in that it is a block-structured language; procedures may be nested. Algol is now obsolete: it has been superceded by Pascal and Ada.
Fortran and Algol
are able to perform efficient coputations. In business
software the computational operations are trivial, but the
amount of data that needs to be hadled is often vast.
COBOL stands for COmmon Business Oriented Language and it
is the most important language for business applications
Books on COBOL
Pascal was developed in the early 1970s as a successor to Algol.
The language was developed by Nicklaus Wirth an Tony Hoare. It
was developed with the aims of providing a teaching language and
to define a truly standard language that was easy to implement
on any computer. For many years it was very popular as a teaching
language and also in practice.
Books on Pascal
Ada was designed under instructions from the United States Department
of Defense as a common language for programming large scale and
real-time systems. It is similar to Pascal, but it is a much larger
language. It is written for software engineering; developing
reliable and re-usable code. Ada has now been superceded by Ada 95.
Books on Ada
C originates in the 1960s. It was developed by Dennis Richie and Ken
Thompson. It was developed alongside the Unix operating system. C is
a programmers language; it retains the benefits of both high and
low level languages. C++ is an object-oriented language that
was developed from C++.
Books on C ,
Books on C++
Java is a new programming language. It is a c-like language. Although it contains
the ability to produce graphical output, it is a very portable language.
It is an object-oriented language.
However, the main advantages of Java are that it is free; Sun provides
a free Java Development Kit from
www.java.sun.com . Applications in Java can be written as applets and
therefore interpreted via any www browser. Hence applets have a wide immediate
mass of potential users, without the need for the purchase of additional software.
Books on Java