Байланысты: Morozova E.N. English for IT Students(2)
Third-generation Programming Languages (Part I)
There are many higher-level languages and there is no reason why you should have to know the details of each. However, it is always helpful to know a little about the more common languages you may hear about in programming circles. Some of the fading third-generation languages include the following:
FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator). FORTRAN was designed specifically for mathematical and engineering programs. FORTRAN has not been widely used with personal computers. Instead, FORTRAN remains a common language on mainframe systems, especially those used for research and education.
COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language). COBOL was developed in 1960 by a government-appointed committee to help solve the problem of incompatibilities among computer manufacturers. Although COBOL was once popular, especially on mainframe systems, it has lost some of its following over the past ten years.
BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). BASIC was developed in the mid-1960s, mainly as a tool for teaching programming to students. Because of its simplicity, BASIC quickly became popular. When the use of personal computers became widespread, it was the first high-level language to be implemented on these new machines. One early version of BASIC shipped on the newly popular PCs was GWBASIC. As you might have guessed, GW stands for "Gates, William" so you can see how influential Bill Gates was in the early development of PC software. Today, popular examples of BASIC include Microsoft's Visual Basic, Visual Basic for Applications (the scripting language behind Microsoft Office), and VBScript (which is common in many Web pages).
Pascal. Named after the seventeenth-century French inventor Blaise Pascal, Pascal was intended in the early 1970s to overcome the limitations of other programming languages and to demonstrate the benefits of structured programming. More recently, developers have taken Pascal a step further, and it is now well-known for its implementation of object-oriented principles of programming.
