125 papers · page 2 of 7
Emerald is an object-based programming language and system designed and implemented in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Washington in the early and mid-1980s. The goal of Emerald was to simplify the construction of distributed applications. This goal was re…
AppleScript is a scripting language and environment for the Mac OS. Originally conceived in 1989, AppleScript allows end users to automate complex tasks and customize Mac OS applications. To automate tasks, AppleScript provides standard programming language features (control flow…
This paper is a highly personal and subjective account of how the language of statecharts came into being. The main novelty of the language is in being a fully executable visual formalism intended for capturing the behavior of complex real-world systems, and an interesting aspect…
This paper describes the history of Haskell, including its genesis and principles, technical contributions, implementations and tools, and applications and impact.
We report on the birth and evolution of Lua and discuss how it moved from a simple configuration language to a versatile, widely used language that supports extensible semantics, anonymous functions, full lexical scoping, proper tail calls, and coroutines.
High Performance Fortran (HPF) is a high-level data-parallel programming system based on Fortran. The effort to standardize HPF began in 1991, at the Supercomputing Conference in Albuquerque, where a group of industry leaders asked Ken Kennedy to lead an effort to produce a commo…
This paper tells the story of the development of BETA: a programming language with just one abstraction mechanism, instead of one abstraction mechanism for each kind of program element (classes, types, procedures, functions, etc.). The paper explains how this single abstraction m…
ZPL is an implicitly parallel programming language, which means all instructions to implement and manage the parallelism are inserted by the compiler. It is the first implicitly parallel language to achieve performance portability, that is, consistent high performance across all …
This paper outlines the history of the C++ programming language from the early days of its ISO standardization (1991), through the 1998 ISO standard, to the later stages of the C++0x revision of that standard (2006). The emphasis is on the ideals, constraints, programming techniq…
The years 1985 through 1995 saw the birth and development of the language Self, starting from its design by the authors at Xerox PARC, through first implementations by Ungar and his graduate students at Stanford University, and then with a larger team formed when the authors join…
This is an account of the development of the languages Modula-2 and Oberon. Together with their ancestors ALGOL 60 and Pascal they form a family called Algol-like languages. Pascal (1970) reflected the ideas of structured programming, Modula-2 (1979) added those of modular system…
The programming language, Prolog, was born of a project aimed not at producing a programming language but at processing natural languages; in this case, French. The project gave rise to a preliminary version of Prolog at the end of 1971 and a more definitive version at the end of…
The Icon programming language, which was conceived in 1977, was strongly influenced by the earlier SNOBOL languages and the subsequent SL5. This paper concentrates primarily on the early development of Icon, but also discusses subsequent versions. The motivation, design philosoph…
This is a personal history of the early development of the monitor concept and its implementation in the programming language Concurrent Pascal. The paper explains how monitors evolved from the ideas of Dahl, Dijkstra, Hoare, and the author (1971-73). At Caltech the author and hi…
Most ideas come from previous ideas. The sixties, particularly in the ARPA community, gave rise to a host of notions about “human-computer symbiosis” through interactive time-shared computers, graphics screens and pointing devices. Advanced computer languages were invented to sim…
ALGOL 68 is a language with a lot of “history”. The reader will hear of discord, resignations, unreadable documents, a minority report, and all manner of politicking. But although ALGOL 68 was produced by a committee (and an unruly one at that), the language itself is no camel. I…
The idea of a data abstraction has had a significant impact on the development of programming languages and on programming methodology. CLU was the first implemented programming language to provide direct linguistic support for data abstraction. This paper provides a history of d…
The history of simulation programming languages is organized as a progression in periods of similar developments. The five periods, spanning 1955-1986, are labeled: The Period Search (1955-1960); The Advent (1961-1965); The Formative Period (1966-1970); The Expansional Period (19…
Forth is unique among programming languages in that its development and proliferation has been a grass-roots effort unsupported by any major corporate or academic sponsors. Originally conceived and developed by a single individual, its later development progressed under two signi…
The C programming language was devised in the early 1970s as a system implementation language for the nascent Unix operating system. Derived from the typeless language BCPL, it evolved a type structure; created on a tiny machine as a tool to improve a meager programming environme…