Overview

Programs for the first stored program electronic computers consisted of a list of machine instructions coded in binary. It was a considerable advance when assemblers became available, so that a programmer could use mnemonic codes such as LOAD X, instead of needing to know the code for the instruction to load a variable from memory to a register and the physical address of the memory location. The first widely available higher level programming language was developed at IBM in the mid 1950s and called Fortran, for formula translation. Programmers could write instructions such as x = (a + b)*c, and the compiler would then determine the necessary machine language instructions to be executed. Fortran became extremely popular and is still widely used for scientific computing today. Soon after Fortran was established, the programming language ALGOL was developed by an international group of academic computer scientists. Although ALGOL had many nicer programming constructs than Fortran, it never achieved the latter's success, mainly because Fortran was designed to be highly efficient from its inception, which ALGOL was not. ^[16] However, many of the innovations of ALGOL, such as the notions of block structure and recursion, survived in subsequent programming languages, including Pascal, which appeared in the 1970s. These notions also greatly influenced later modifications of Fortran, particularly the major revisions Fortran 77 and Fortran 90 in 1977 and 1990, respectively.

In the 1980s, the programming language C, a product of Bell Labs, emerged as the lingua franca of...