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In 1958, John McCarthy at MIT developed a very different type of language. This language was LISP (for
LISt Processing), and it was modeled on mathematical functions. It is a particularly good language for working
with lists of numbers, words, and objects, and it has been widely used in artificial intelligence (AI) work.
In mathematics, a function takes arguments and returns a value. LISP works the same way, and LISP is
called a ???functional language??? as a result. Here is the LISP code that will add two numbers and return the sum:
(+ 2 5)
This code says the function is addition, and the two numbers to add are 2 and 5. The LISP language processor
will return the number 7 as a result. Functional languages are also called ???declarative languages??? because the
functions are declared, and the execution of the program is simply the evaluation of the functions. We will return
to functional languages later.
In 1959 a consortium of six computer manufacturers and three US government agencies released Cobol as
the computing language for business applications (COmmercial and Business-Oriented Language). Cobol, like
FORTRAN, is an imperative, procedural language. To make the code more self-documenting, Cobol was designed
to be a remarkably ???wordy??? language.
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