Week 2b

Question 1

Describe COBOL

Answer 1

Common Business Oriented Language

Question 2

Who was the principal mentor

Answer 2

Grace Murray Hopper(1906-1992)

Question 3

Cobol was based on and what features did it have

Answer 3

FLOW MATIC
Features:
* Names up to 12 characters, with embedded hyphens
* English names for arithmetic operators
* Data and code were completely separate
* Verbs were first word in every statemen

Question 4

What were the design goals

Answer 4

• Must look like simple English
• Must be easy to use, even if that means it will be less powerful
• Must broaden the base of computer users
• Must not be biased by current compiler problems

Question 5

What design problems did they have

Answer 5

Arithmetic expressions?
Subscripts
Fight among manufactures

Question 6

Describe BASIC

Answer 6

• Beginner’s All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
• Designed by Kemeny & Kurtz at Dartmouth

Question 7

Mention goals for BASIC

Answer 7

• Easy to learn and use for non-science students and as a path to
  Fortran and Algol
• Must be ”pleasant and friendly”
• Fast turnaround for homework
  9
• Free and private access
• User time is more important than computer timE

Question 8

Describe LISP

Answer 8

• LISt Processing language (Designed at MIT byJohn
  McCarthy)
  AI research needed a language that:
• Process data in lists (rather than arrays)
• Symbolic computation (rather than numeric)
• Syntax is based on the lambda calculus
• No need for variables or assignment
• Control via recursion and conditional expressions

Question 9

What is the status of LISP

Answer 9

Still the dominant language for AI
* COMMON LISP and Scheme are contemporary
dialects
* ML, Miranda, and Haskell are related languages

Question 10

What were the successes behind Algo58

Answer 10

• It was the standard way to publish algorithms for over 20 years
• All subsequent imperative languages are based on it
• First machine-independent language
• First language whose syntax was formally defined (BNF)

Question 11

What were the failures behind Algo60

Answer 11

1. No i/o and the character set made
   programs nonportable
2. Too flexible–hard to implement
3. Entrenchment of FORTRAN
4. Formal syntax description
5. Lack of support of IBM

Question 12

Describe APL

Answer 12

• designed by K.Iverson at Harvard in late
  1950’s
• A Programming Language
• A language for programming mathematical
  computations
  –especially those using matrices
• Functional style and many whole array
  operations
• Drawback is requirement of special keyboard

Question 13

Desribe PL/1

Answer 13

• PL/1 designed in 1963-4
  – supposed to be all purpose
  – combined features of FORTRAN, COBOL and Algol60 and
  more!
  – translators were slow, huge and unreliable
  – some say it was ahead of its time……

Question 14

Describe C

Answer 14

• Designed for systems programming at Bell Labs
  by Dennis Richie and colleagues.
• Evolved primarily from B, but also ALGOL 68
• Powerful set of operators, but poor type checking
• Initially spread through UNIX and the availability
  of high quality, free compilers.