The ALGOL Programming Language-then and now

-





The ALGOL(Algorithmic Programming Language) developed in the mid 1950’ s with the aims of:
  • Creating a a language for scientific computation.
  •  A language that was machine independent.
  •  A universally accepted Programming Language.
  •  Being the first language that Addressed the issue of software portability.
All these goalswere acheved by an international Committe  in the late 1950s’ in a report entitled Algol58 followed by other reports etitled Algol60 and Algol68 respectively .Like many other languages it had a few problems here and there:
  1.  Although machine independence enabled developers to be more creative it made implementing more difficult.
Despite the fact that the commercial populatrity of the Algol Family was not as great as other languages in its time such as Cobal and Fortran, but  you could say that its algorithmic structure was, which made it the most important language of its time.

Languages which were later developed  after(B,C,CPL,Pascal,ADA just to name a few) were all influenced by the ALGOLfamily in some way or the other  for example:
  • The use of dynamic arrays
  •  Reserved Words
  •  User Defined Types 
As well as other ALGOL like syntax patterns .

So with that we hail the original implementers of the ALGOL language for if it wasnt for them most of these languages that we have come to love wouldnt be. 


sources- http://groups.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis400/algol/algol.html
               - wikipedia

Comments

  1. donareeFebruary 20, 2012 at 5:46 AM

    awesome thanks for this post

    ReplyDelete
  2. GeegoFebruary 20, 2012 at 10:26 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. GeegoFebruary 20, 2012 at 10:39 PM

    I'm no tech head but I get the point of this blog,I'm here typing this and listening to music at the same time, if it was not for the original creators of the algorithm all this probably wouldn't be possible. So for all you out there enjoying the benefits of 2 and forgot that you first need 1 you need to talk a closer look at this brother is saying. Hail to the original implementers of the algorithm for it was they who set all this in motion.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Epic Battle-Starting or Ending?

-
Over the years we have gotten accustomed to  the fighting for the top spots in computing between two major companies. One company you could say is power hungry and tries to have complete control over its users and the other company not so much as it allows its users to make modifications to an extent making it the greater of the two evils in my opinion. As some of you readers might have already guessed im talking about the epic battle between Microsoft and Apple, two of the biggest household and commercial names when it comes on to desktops, laptops and recently tablets. Both Microsoft and Apple have come a long way in there competition  but all that may change in the future, how is that you may ask,  i can sum it up all in one word Google.The growing popularity of the Android operating system has started taking its toll on both Microsoft and Apple as it has started taking over the mobile market with alot of good reviews com...
Read more

How People Think

-
Image
Recently i was on techjamaica in their forums where im a regular and one of its members posted a video of persons being being tricked into thinking that what they were testing out was the new iPad 3 which really were iPad2s, check it out  here . What fellow posters in the the thread and i kept talking about is how Apple is able to reproduce the same iDevices with not much major changes to the hardware or software and continue to reap a lot from it, but as usual there are always going to be devoted apple fans that hate  when you talk the truth. I might sound as if i hate Apple but i dont,  in fact i love using there products.Then what is the reason for this post ?..it is merely just to give users of these products a heads up when upgrading to the "latest". Reasons to get an iPad 3: You never had a device made by Apple. You care about performance and for you the iPad 1 or 2 just wasn't cutting it. You care about hardware and you love the fact that it is built...
Read more