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From: jnixon@andrew.ATL.GE.COM (John F Nixon)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: First language?
Message-ID: <234@puma.ge.com>
Date: 21 Mar 90 12:54:01 GMT
References: <BZD4F2w160w@nstar.UUCP> <1106@m1.cs.man.ac.uk>
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alan@ipse4.uucp (Alan Wills) writes:
>>From: paranoid@nstar.UUCP (Damian Gick)
>>Does anyone know what the name of the first high-level language was?
>Was this pre FORTRAN? (Which was 1953, and the group was led by Grace Hopper.)

Grace Hopper's contribution was COBOL, not FORTRAN.  The FORTRAN group
was led by John Backus.  FORTRAN was almost certainly the first
*popular* high level language developed.  Here are some excerpts
(without permission) from "Principles of Programming Languages:
Design, Evaluation, and Implementation" by Bruce J. MacLennan:

	... An elegant algebraic language developed by Laning and Zierler 
	of MIT was compiling code as early as 1952, but it was largely
	ignored.

	... In the 1950s Grace Murray Hopper, another pioneer language 
	developer, organized a number of symposia under the auspices of 
	the Office of Naval Research (ONR). ... [at the May 1954 symposium,
	Backus was] given a copy of the report describing the Laning and
	Zierler system, which was demonstrated for them in June 1954.  By 
	November 1954 Backus and three associates had produced a preliminary
	external specification for "the IBM FORmula TRANslating System,
	FORTRAN."  At a 1978 conference on the history of programming
	languages Backus stated, "As far as we were aware, we simply made up 
	the language as we went along.  We did not regard language design
	as a difficult problem... "

FORTRAN was officially released in April 1957.  FORTRAN II was proposed in
September 1957!!  Unfortunatly, I don't have a handy pointer to the dates
for COBOL, nor any other information on the Laning and Zierler language.

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jnixon@atl.ge.com                    ...steinmetz!atl.decnet!jnxion