The following line adds two numbers and stores the result in a third variable:
ADD Y, Z GIVING X.
Many students in computer science today regard Cobol as old technology, but even today there are more lines
of production code in daily use written in Cobol than in any other language (http://archive.adaic.com/docs/
reports /lawlis/content.htm).
Both PL/1 and BASIC were introduced in 1964. These, too, are procedural, imperative languages. IBM
designed PL/1 with the plan of ???unifying??? scientific and commercial programming. PL/1 was part of the IBM
360 project, and PL/1 was intended to supplant both FORTRAN and Cobol, and become the one language
programmers would henceforth use for all projects (Pugh, E., Johnson, L., & Palmer, J. IBM??™s 360 and Early
370 Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). Needless to say, IBM??™s strategy failed to persuade all those
FORTRAN and Cobol programmers.
BASIC was designed at Dartmouth by professors Kemeny and Kurtz as a simple language for beginners.
BASIC stands for Beginner??™s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Originally BASIC really was simple, too
simple, in fact, for production use; it had few data types and drastic restrictions on the length of variable names,
for example.
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