Computer Programming - Wyomissing Area High School
Mr. Minich
high level languages - readily understandable
assembly language - some English words that are understandable to a layman
machine language - binary represented by bits (1's and 0's) that is virtually
unreadable by a human
a compiler or an interpreter must be used to convert a high level language
into a machine language
Examples of high level languages:
Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) - developed by John
Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz of Dartmouth College in 1965 as an academic language. We
use TrueBASIC but there are many other versions including MS Visual BASIC, QuickBASIC,
and others. Note that our textbook was authored by the inventors of the BASIC language.
Pascal - named after Blaise Pascal, the inventor of the adding machine and,
of course, Pascal's Triangle. It was developed as an academic language in the late
1960s by Niklaus Wirth.
Formula Translation (FORTRAN) - a language that is widely used in math, science,
and engineering applications. Mr. Minich was required to study this language as an
undergraduate engineering college major.
Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL) - widely used in business applications.
C and C++ - a very popular language used throughout the 1980's and 1990's.
Most commercial applications including software and games that you have at home are
written in C or C++. The two languages are similar but C++ takes advantage of object-oriented
programming (OOP).
PL/I - an all-purpose mainframe language
Report Program Generator (RPG) - a business programming language
Ada - commonly used by the military and the Defense Department (eg. missile
guidance systems)
Assembly - this rather low-level language is used differently on different types
of computers. It is sometimes called "Assembler".
CLOUT, Focus, RAMIS, and Oracle - are language processor languages that convert
English terms into machine language
Artificial Intelligence languages - the language makes decisions and proposes
solutions. The computer itself generates a program. Examples are LISP and
PROLOG.
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