Talk:Programming language
COBOL was not invented by Grace Hopper. She invented Flow-Matic, its precursor and a number of her business partners particpated in the committee that wrote the specifications for COBOL. While no one doubts her important influence, even she did not make this claim. This programming language was developed by a committeee.
A great webpage is Zirings Dictionary on Programming languages
These are the language links currently listed in
They need to be refactored and regularized.
In particular, those language names that are ambiguous
should all either be "Lang programming language" or
"Lang language".
Somebody pick one and make them all consistent, please.
In the list below, I expected that one, sometines two, links
in each line, one language per line, to work.
The list should always show the current status of these
links.
Personally, I think that "lang programming language" is more
precise but "lang language" is just barely good enough.
The only entries that presently use "lang language" are C
and Ruby, so I am going to do what I can to make them work
right and also what I can to make all the ambiguous ones
work right with "lang programming language".
- Altair BASIC, True BASIC, Visual Basic
- C(letter) -- C language -- C programming language
- Ruby(gemstone) -- Ruby language -- Ruby programming language
-- Buzco
The real name of Fortran is FORTRAN, by the way. Fortran is just a redirect to FORTRAN
Is it PL/1 or PL/I (ie: is it a one or an eye)
Digging around on IBM suggests that it is PL/I pronounced Pee Ell One (roman numeral for one). That is consistent with my Dragon Book which uses PL/I except in one place where it uses PL/1 but I think that might be a typo. It is called "PL/I" by the ANSI standard: ANSI X3.74-1987 (R1998) Title: Information Systems - Programming Language - PL/I General-Purpose Subset
The "real" name of Fortran is not FORTRAN, go and read the section "Spelling" on the FORTRAN page. The reason there is a redirect is because both spellings are used and we want obvious linking to work. The pages Fortran and FORTRAN should probably be swapped round, but it doesn't matter much.
These easy were already satisfactorily explained the respective language articles. Didn't you read them?
--drj
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This article seems to be written largely from the point of view of a programmer in mainstream languages. For example, interactive use is attributed to interpreters, without considering that eg. many Smalltalk and Lisp systems have native compilers that are used interactively. Also, the classification by types misses eg. C which is typed but not type-safe (use of void*, casts can result undiagnosed run-time type errors). Lisp is not really typeless -- all values have types which are checked at run time, even though variables do not (usually...) have types; this is sometimes called manifest typing. Sorry for not bothering to work this rant into a considered and balanced edit of the article.
-- han