Evolution of the Major Programming Languages
Written on 18.59 by Unknown
Hello, welcome back to my blog. This is my second assignment from the same lecture. This time i was required to answer the Review Question and Problem Set from the second chapter of Sebesta's Programming Language Concepts book.
Here is the answer for the review questions :
Here is the answer for the review questions :
1. In what year was Plankalkül designed? In what year was that design published?
· It was designed in 1945 and the design was published 27 years later or on 1972.
2. What two common data structures were included in Plankalkül?
· The 2 common data structures were arrays and records.
3. How were the pseudocodes of the early 1950s implemented?
· The Pseudocodes were implemented by a pure interpreter.
4. Speedcoding was invented to overcome two significant shortcomings of the
computer hardware of the early 1950s. What were they?
computer hardware of the early 1950s. What were they?
· The shortcomings were the lack of floating point and the lack of automatic incrementing address registers.
5. Why was the slowness of interpretation of programs acceptable in the early 1950s?
· One of the primary reasons why the slowness of interpretive systems was tolerated from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s was the lack of floating-point hardware in the available computers. All floating-point operations had to be simulated in software, a very time-consuming process. Because so much processor time was spent in software floating-point processing, the overhead of interpretation and the simulation of indexing were relatively insignificant.
1. What features of Plankalkül do you think would
have had the greatest influence on FORTRAN 0 if the FORTRAN designers had been
familiar with Plankalkül?
· The feature of Plankalkül that can have a great influenced
on Fortran 0 if the Fortran designers had been familiar with Plankalkül is the inclusion
of mathematical expressions showing the current relationships between program
variables, which could make Fortran 0 compute floating point more faster.
2. Determine the capabilities of Backus’s 701
Speedcoding system, and compare them with those of a contemporary programmable
hand calculator.
· The Speedcoding interpreter effectively
converted the 701 to a virtual three-address floating-point calculator. The
system included pseudo instructions for the four arithmetic operations on
floating-point data, as well as operations such as square root, sine, arc
tangent, exponent, and logarithm. Conditional and unconditional branches and
input/output conversions were also part of the virtual architecture.
Speedcoding included the novel facility of automatically incrementing address
registers. This facility did not appear in hardware until the UNIVAC 1107
computers of 1962. Because of such features, matrix multiplication could be done
in 12 Speedcoding instructions. Backus claimed that problems that could take
two weeks to program in machine code could be programmed in a few hours using
Speedcoding. It means that Backus’s 701 speedcoding system can solve arithmetic
problem much more faster than using programmable hand calculator.
3. Write a short history of the A-0, A-1, and A-2
systems designed by Grace Hopper and her associates.
· Between 1951 and 1953, a team led by Grace
Hopper at UNIVAC developed a series of “compiling” systems named A-0, A-1, and
A-2 that expanded a pseudo- code into machine code subprograms in the same way
as macros are expanded into assembly language. The pseudo-code source for these
“compilers” was still quite primitive, although even this was a great
improvement over machine code because it made source programs much shorter.
Wilkes (1952) independently suggested a similar process. Maurice V. Wilkes
(also at Cambridge) extended the idea to design an assembly program that could
combine chosen subroutines and allocate storage (Wilkes et al., 1951, 1957).
4. As a research project, compare the facilities of
FORTRAN 0 with those of the Laning and Zierler system.
· The Laning and Zierler system (Laning and
Zierler, 1954) was the first algebraic translation system to be implemented. By
algebraic, it means that it translated arithmetic expressions, used separately
coded subprograms to compute transcendental functions (e.g., sine and
logarithm), and included arrays. Such facilities was not found in Fortran 0
that still hadn’t used interpretation on algebraic translation and arrays system.
In fact the facilities in Laning and Zierler system was more superior to
Fortran 0, but it was never escaped MIT which is a shame.
5. Which of the three original goals of the ALGOL
design committee, in your opinion, was most difficult to achieve at that time?
- “It should be possible to use the language for the description of algorithms in printed publications” was the most difficult goal to achieve at that time because it was something that entirely new to the computer business, at that time publication for algorithm in the human language is hard to understand since it is a new language that they never used before so they need to know how the language work first.
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