Programming language applications

Read the following words and word combinations and use them for understanding and translation of the text:

spreadsheet – (динамическая) электронная таблица, таб-личная программа

to embed – внедрять, встраивать

diversity – разнообразие

to be content – быть согласным

elaborate – детально разработанный

decimal numbers – десятичные числа

rather than -...а не...

therefore – следовательно

to burden – обременять

mark-up language – язык разметки

pervasive – широко распространенный

floating-point computations – вычисления с плавающей точкой

Computers have been applied to a myriad of different areas, from controlling nuclear power plants to providing video games in mobile phones. Because of this great diversity in computer use, programming languages with very different goals have been developed. We can also understand why there are hundreds of programming languages: two different classes of problems may demand different levels of abstraction, and different programmers have different ideas on how abstraction should be done. A C programmer is perfectly content to work at a level of abstraction that requires specification of computations using arrays and indices, while an author of a report prefers to “program” using a language consisting of the functions of a word-processor.

Virtually all successful programming languages were originally designed for one specific use. This is not to say that each language is good for only one purpose.

Scientific applications. The first digital computers, which appeared in the 1940s, were used and indeed invented for scientific applications. Typically, scientific applications have simple data structures but require large numbers of floating-point arithmetic computations. The most common data structures are arrays and matrices; the most common control structures are counting loops and selections. The early high-level programming languages invented for scientific applications were designed to provide for those needs. Their competitor was assembly language, so efficiency was a primary concern. The first language for scientific applications was FORTRAN.

Business applications. The use of computers for business applications began in the 1950s. Special computers were developed for this purpose, along with special language. The first successful high-level language for business was COBOL, the initial version of which appeared in 1960. Business languages are characterized by facilities for producing elaborate reports, precise ways of describing and storing decimal numbers and character data, and the ability to specify arithmetic operations.

With the advent of personal computers came new ways for businesses to use computers. Two specific tools that can be used on small computers, spreadsheet systems and database systems, were developed for business and now are widely used, in both homes and businesses.

Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a broad area of computer applications characterized by the use of symbolic rather than numeric computations. Symbolic computation means that symbols, consisting of names rather than numbers, are manipulated. Also, symbolic computation is more conveniently done with linked lists of data rather than arrays. This kind of programming sometimes requires more flexibility than other programming domains.

The first widely used programming language developed for AI applications was the functional language LISP, which appeared in 1959. During the early 1970s, however, an alternative approach to some of these applications appeared – logic programming using the Prolog language. More recently, some AI applications have been written in scientific languages such as C.

Systems programming. The operating system and all of the programming support tools of a computer system are collectively known as its systems software. Systems software is used continuously and therefore must be efficient. Therefore, a language for this domain must provide fast execution. Furthermore, it must have low-level features that allow the software interfaces to external devices to be written.

In the 1960s and 1970s, some computer manufacturers, such as IBM, Digital, and Burroughs (now UNYSYS), developed special machine-oriented high-level languages for systems software on their machines: PL/S, BLISS, and ALGOL.

The UNIX operating system is written almost entirely in C, which has made it relatively easy to port to different machines. Some of the characteristics of C make it a good choice for systems programming. It is low-level, execution-efficient, and does not burden the user with many safety restrictions.

Web software. The WWW is supported by an eclectic collection of languages, ranging from mark-up languages, such as XHTML, which is not a programming language, to general-purpose programming languages, such as Java. XHTML provides a way of embedding presentation instructions in the pages of information, which could include text, images, sound, or animation, that constitute Web content. These instructions are targeted to presentation devices, which could be browser displays, printers, or other devices. Because of the pervasive need for dynamic Web content, some computation capability is often included in the technology of content presentation. This functionality can be provided by embedding a programming code in an XHTML document. Such code is often in the form of a scripting language, such as PHP or Python.

Notes:

UNYSYS – компьютерная компания в США, основана в 1986 г.

XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) – расши­ряемый язык гипертекстовой разметки

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) – скриптовый язык програм­мирования общего назначения, применяемый для разра­ботки веб-приложений