Program & Programming Languages

Introduction to Programming

Programming is the process of writing a computer program in a language that the computer can respond to and that other programmers can understand.The set of instructions, data, and rules that can be used to construct a program is called a programming language.

The History of C

C evolved from two previous languages, BCPL, and B. BCPL was developed in 1967 by Martin Richards as a language for writing operating systems software and compilers. Ken Thompson modeled many features in his language B after their counterparts in BCPL and used B to create early version of the UNIX operating system at Bell Laboratories in 1970 on a DEC PDP-7 computer. The C language was evolved from B by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories in 1972.

History of C (cont.)

The rapid expansion of C over various types of computers led to many variations.

These were similar, but often incompatible.

In 1989, the standard was approved. – The document is referred to as ANSI/ISO

9899:1990.

Other High-Level languages

Hundreds of high-level languages have been developed, but only a few have achieved broad acceptance.

FORTRAN (FORmulaTRANslator) was developed by IBM between 1954 and 1957 to be used for scientific and engineering applications that require complex mathematical computations.

Other High-Level languages (cont.)

COBAL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) was developed in 1959 by a group of computer manufactures and government and industrial computer users. – Today, more than half of all business software

is still programmed in COBAL.

PASCAL was designed at about the same time as C. It was introduced for academic use.

Other version of C

Other versions of C have been developed through continuing research efforts at Bell Laboratories.– Gehani (Ge89) had developed Concurrent C - a C

superset that includes capabilities for specifying that multiple activities can be performed in parallel.

Another C superset, namely, C++, was developed by Bjarne Stroustup (St86) at Bell Laboratories. – C++ provides capabilities to do object-oriented

programming. Objects are essentially reusable software components that model items in the real world.

The History of Matlab

Jack Little and Cleve Moler, the founders of The MathWorks, recognized the need among engineers and scientists for more powerful and productive computation environments beyond those provided by languages such as Fortran and C. In response to that need in 1984, they combined their expertise in mathematics, engineering, and computer science to develop MATLAB®, a high-performance technical computing environment. MATLAB combines comprehensive math and graphics functions with a powerful high-level language.

Object-Oriented Languages

One of the motivations for object-oriented languages has been the development of graphical screens capable of displaying multiple windows. In such an environment each window on the screen can conveniently be considered as an object, with associated characteristics, such as color, position, and size. Under an object orientation a program must first define the objects it will be manipulating; this includes describing both the characteristics of the object and the procedures that can be used to manipulate and alter these characteristics.

Algorithms and Procedures

As algorithms are central to Matlab’s procedure-oriented side, it will serve us well to understand what an algorithm is.

From a procedural point of view, before writing a program, a programmer must clearly understand what data is to be used, the desired result, and the procedure to be used to produce this result.

Algorithms and Procedures (cont.)

The procedure to be used is referred to as an algorithm. More precisely, an algorithm is defined as a step-by-step sequence of instructions that describes how a computation is to be performed.