Programming Language Information

Programming Language:

                        A programming language is a set of words, abbreviations, and symbols that enables a programmer to communicate instructions to a computer.

Types of Programming Languages:

i.      Low-Level Programming Language.

ii.     High-Level Programming Language.

Low-level Programming Language:

                        A low-level language is a programming language that is machine dependent. A machine dependent language runs on only one particular type of computer.

High-Level Programming Language:

                        High-level language, by contrast, each language instruction typically equates to multiple machine instructions. High-level languages often are machine independent. A machine-independent language can run on many different types of computers and operating systems.

Here firstly we should know about the following generations of Languages.

Machine Language:

                        Machine language, known as the first generation of programming languages, is the only language the computer directly recognizes. Machine language instructions use a series of binary digits (1s and 0s) or a combination of numbers and letters that represents binary digits.

Assembly Language:

                        With an assembly language, the second generation of programming languages, a programmer writes instructions using symbolic instruction codes. Symbolic instruction codes are meaningful abbreviations.  

           

Procedural Language:

In a procedural language, the programmer writes instructions that tell the computer what to accomplish and how to do it. With a procedural language, often called a third-generation language (3GL), a programmer uses a series of English-like words to write instructions. For example, ADD stands for addition or PRINT means to print.

Un-procedural Languages:

                        A 4GL ( fourth-generation language) is a nonprocedural language that enables users and programmers to access data in a database. With a nonprocedural language, the programmer writes English-like instructions or interacts with a graphical environment to retrieve data from files or a database. Nonprocedural languages typically are easier

to use than procedural languages.

                        Now we are going to explain some of the programming languages. Where some are the non-interrupted  (Non-Scripted) and others are the interrupted languages (Scripting Languages).

Here are some examples of scripted as well as non-scripted languages.

Scripted Languages	Non-Scripted Languages
C++	C
C# (C-Sharp)	Basic
Java Script	HTML
Visual Basic script	Java
PHP	Cobol

Note:

         Scripting Languages are easy to learn and use for a programmer than a non-scripting language.

                                                                             

                                                     Programming Languages

1) Basic:

            Basic language is infact a machine language, it uses the binary numbers 0 and 1 to make instructions.

History:

The original BASIC language was designed in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz and implemented by a team of Dartmouth students under their direction. BASIC was designed to allow students to write programs for the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System.

Uses:

        It was during this period that a number of simple computer games were written in BASIC, most notably Mike Mayfield's Star Trek. A number of these were collected by David H. Ahl while he worked at DEC and published in a newsletter he compiled. He later collected a number of these into book form, "101 BASIC Computer Games", which was first published in 1973.

2) Visual Basic:

            Visual basic is a third generation language, it is derived from Basic language.

History and uses:

            VB 1.0 was introduced in 1991. The drag and drop design for creating the user interface is derived from a prototype form generator developed by Alan Cooper and his company called Tripod.

Visual Basic 2.0 was released in November 1992. The programming environment was easier to use, and its speed was improved.

Visual Basic 3.0 was released in the summer of 1993 and came in Standard and Professional versions. VB3 included version 1.1 of the Microsoft Jet Database Engine that could read and write Jet (or Access) 1.x databases.

Visual Basic 4.0 (August 1995) was the first version that could create 32-bit as well as 16-bit Windows programs. It has three editions; Standard, Professional, and Enterprise. 

With version 5.0 (February 1997), Microsoft released Visual Basic exclusively for 32-bit versions of Windows. Programmers who preferred to write 16-bit programs were able to import programs written in Visual Basic 4.0 to Visual Basic 5.0, and Visual Basic 5.0 programs can easily be converted with Visual Basic 4.0.

Visual Basic 6.0 (Mid 1998) improved in a number of areas^[9] including the ability to create web-based applications. VB6 has entered Microsoft's "non-supported phase" as of March 2008. Although the Visual Basic 6.0 development environment is no longer supported, the runtime is supported on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7.

3) Cobol:

           

History:

            The COBOL specification was created by a committee of researchers from private industry, universities, and government during the second half of 1959. The specifications were to a great extent inspired by the FLOW-MATIC language invented by Grace Hopper - commonly referred to as "the mother of the COBOL language." The IBM COMTRAN language invented by Bob Bemer was also drawn upon, but the FACT language specification from Honeywell was not distributed to committee members until late in the process and had relatively little impact. FLOW-MATIC's status as the only language of the bunch to have actually been implemented made it particularly attractive to the committee.

Uses:

       COBOL as defined in the original specification included a PICTURE clause for detailed field specification. It did not support local variables, recursion, dynamic memory allocation, or structured programming constructs. Support for some or all of these features has been added in later editions of the COBOL standard. COBOL has many reserved words (over 400), called keywords                                                                             .

4) C:

        C is a non-Scripting language.

History:

The initial development of C occurred at AT&T Bell Labs between 1969 and 1973. According to Ritchie, the most creative period occurred in 1972. It was named "C" because its features were derived from an earlier language called "B", which according to Ken Thompson was a stripped-down version of the BCPL programming language.

Origin:

In 1978, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie published the first edition of The C Programming Language. This book, known to C programmers as "K&R", served for many years as an informal specification of the language. The version of C that it describes is commonly referred to as K&R C. The second edition of the book covers the later ANSI C standard.

Uses:

         C is often used for "system programming", including implementing operating systems and embedded system applications, due to a combination of desirable characteristics such as code portability and efficiency, ability to access specific hardware addresses, ability to pun to match externally imposed data access requirements, and low run-time demand on system resources. C can also be used for website programming using CGI as a "gateway" for information between the Web application, the server, and the browser. Some reasons for choosing C over interpreted languages are its speed, stability, and near-universal availability.

5) C++:

History:

Bjarne Stroustrup, a Danish and British trained computer scientist, began his work on "C with Classes" in 1979. The idea of creating a new language originated from Stroustrup's experience in programming for his Ph.D. thesis. Stroustrup found that Simula had features that were very helpful for large software development, but the language was too slow for practical use, while BCPL was fast but too low-level to be suitable for large software development. When Stroustrup started working in AT&T Bell Labs, he had the problem of analyzing the UNIX kernel with respect to distributed computing.

Origin:

According to Stroustrup: "the name signifies the evolutionary nature of the changes from C". During C++'s development period, the language had been referred to as "new C", then "C with Classes". The final name is credited to Rick Mascitti (mid-1983) and was first used in December 1983. When Mascitti was questioned informally in 1992 about the naming, he indicated that it was given in a tongue-in-cheek spirit.

Uses:

C++ inherits most of C's syntax. The following is Bjarne Stroustrup's version of the Hello world program that uses the C++ Standard Library stream facility to write a message to standard output:

# include <iostream>

int main()

{

   std::cout << "Hello, world!\n";

}

6) C#:

History:

During the development of the .NET Framework, the class libraries were originally written using a managed code compiler system calledSimple Managed C (SMC). In January 1999, Anders Hejlsberg formed a team to build a new language at the time called Cool, which stood for "C-like Object Oriented Language". Microsoft had considered keeping the name "Cool" as the final name of the language, but chose not to do so for trademark reasons. By the time the .NET project was publicly announced at the July 2000Professional Developers Conference, the language had been renamed C#, and the class libraries and ASP.NET runtime had been ported to C#.

Origin:

James Gosling, who created the Java programming language in 1994, and Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, the originator of Java, called C# an "imitation" of Java; Gosling further claimed that "[C# is] sort of Java with reliability, productivity and security deleted." Klaus Kreft and Angelika Langer (authors of a C++ streams book) stated in a blog post that "Java and C# are almost identical programming languages.

Uses:

Furthermore, C# has added several major features to accommodate functional-style programming, culminating in the LINQ extensions released with C# 3.0 and its supporting framework of lambda expressions, extension methods, and anonymous types. These features enable C# programmers to use functional programming techniques, such as closures, when it is advantageous to their application.

7) HTML:

History:

          In 1980, physicist Tim Berners-Lee, who was a contractor at CERN, proposed and prototyped ENQUIRE, a system for CERN researchers to use and share documents. In 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a memo proposing an Internet-based hypertext system. Berners-Lee specified HTML and wrote the browser and server software in the last part of 1990. In that year, Berners-Lee and CERN data systems engineer Robert Cailliau collaborated on a joint request for funding, but the project was not formally adopted by CERN. In his personal notes from 1990 he listed  "some of the many areas in which hypertext is used" and put an encyclopedia first.

Origin:

         The first publicly available description of HTML was a document called "HTML Tags", first mentioned on the Internet by Berners-Lee in late 1991. It describes 18 elements comprising the initial, relatively simple design of HTML. Except for the hyperlink tag, these were strongly influenced by SGML guide, an in-house SGML based documentation format at CERN. Eleven of these elements still exist in HTML 4.

Uses:

                Hypertext Markup Language is a markup language that web browsers use to interpret and compose text, images and other material into visual or audible web pages. Default characteristics for every item of HTML markup are defined in the browser, and these characteristics can be altered or enhanced by the web page designer's additional use of CSS. Many of the text elements are found in the 1988 ISO technical report TR 9537 Techniques for using SGML, which in turn covers the features of early text formatting languages such as that used by the RUNOFF command developed in the early 1960s for the CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System) operating system: these formatting commands were derived from the commands used by typesetters to manually format documents.

8)  Java:

History:

            James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton initiated the Java language project in June 1991. Java was originally designed for interactive television, but it was too advanced for the digital cable television industry at the time. The language was initially called Oak after an oak tree that stood outside Gosling's office; it went by the name Green later, and was later renamed Java, from Java coffee, said to be consumed in large quantities by the language's creators. Gosling aimed to implement a virtual machine and a language that had a familiar C/C++ style of notation.
Uses:

Google:

Google and Android, Inc. have chosen to use Java as a key pillar in the creation of the Android operating system, an open-source smartphone operating system. Besides the fact that the operating system, built on the Linux 2.6 kernel, was written largely in C, the Android SDK uses Java to design applications for the Android platform.
On May 7, 2012, a San Francisco jury found that if APIs could be copyrighted, then Google had infringed Oracle's copyrights by the use of Java in Android devices. Oracle's stance in this case has raised questions about the legal status of the language. However, the Hon. William Alsup ruled on May 31, 2012, that APIs cannot be copyrighted.

Gaikai:

Gaikai uses the Java browser plug-in to stream game demos to any PC. Gaikai (Japanese for "open ocean") is a cloud-based gaming service that allows users to play high-end PC and console games via the cloud and instantly demo games and applications from a webpage on any computer or internet-connected device.




9) JavaScript:
            JavaScript (JS) is an open source client-side scripting language commonly implemented as part of a web browser in order to create enhanced user interfaces and dynamic websites.
History:
            JavaScript was originally developed in Netscape, by Brendan Eich. Battling with Microsoft over the Internet, Netscape considered their client-server solution as a distributed OS, running a portable version of Sun Microsystems' Java. Because Java was a competitor of C++ and aimed at professional programmers, Netscape also wanted a lightweight interpreted language that would complement Java by appealing to nonprofessional programmers, like Microsoft's Visual Basic. (see JavaScript and Java).
Uses:
            The most common use of JavaScript is to write functions that are embedded in or included from HTML pages and that interact with the Document Object Model (DOM) of the page. Some simple examples of this usage are:

• Loading new page content or submitting data to the server via AJAX without reloading the page (for example, a social network might allow the user to post status updates without leaving the page)
• Animation of page elements, fading them in and out, resizing them, moving them, etc.
• Interactive content, for example games, and playing audio and video
• Validating input values of a web form to make sure that they are acceptable before being submitted to the server.
• Transmitting information about the user's reading habits and browsing activities to various websites. Web pages frequently do this for web analytics, ad tracking, personalization or other purposes.