CS2403ProgrammingLanguagesCourseOverview.pptVIP

CS2403 Programming LanguagesCourse Overview Chung-Ta King Department of Computer Science National Tsing Hua University Programming Language Is … An artificial language designed to express computations or algorithms that can be performed by a computer -- Wikipedia Natural languages such as Chinese and English are not used as programming languages because they cannot be easily translated into machine language that can be executed by the computer? Can a programming language express all possible algorithms? Why Programming Lang. Important? A language is a framework for problem-solving It may facilitate or hinder your thoughts and, thus, the abilities to solve problems It may help you make fewer mistakes ? Understand the languages that you use ? Appreciate history, diversity of ideas ? Be prepared for new programming methods, paradigms, tools Brief History Timeline 50s and 60s: Early high-level lang.: FORTRAN, COBOL, ALGOL60 Early math.-based languages: LISP, APL, SNOBOL All-purpose languages: PL/1 Next leap forward: Algol68, SIMULA67, BASIC 70s: High level and structured programming: Pascal Systems programming: C, modula-2 Logical programming: Prolog Improvement of functional programming: Scheme Brief History Timeline 80s: Functional programming: ML, Miranda Need for reliability and maintainability: Ada Object-oriented programming: Smalltalk, C++ 90s: Productivity tools such as spreadsheets Visual languages: Delphi Scripting languages: Perl Expert systems shells Network computing: Java Know Your Language by Trend Know Your Language by Trend Commercial trend over past 5 years Increasing use of type-safe languages: Java, C#, … Scripting languages, other languages for web applications Teaching trends Emphasize more on expressing algorithms, while less emphasis on how data, control represented in machine Research and development trends Modularity: Java/C++ standardization of new module features Program analysis: automated error detection, programming environment, c