Chapter 9: Programming Languages
Michael L. Overton · Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics eBooks · 2025
Programs for the first stored program electronic computers consisted of a list of machine instructions coded in binary. It was a considerable advance when assemblers became available, so that a programmer could use mnemonic codes such as LOAD X, instead of needing to know the binary code for the instruction to load a variable from memory to a register and the physical address of the memory location. The first widely available higher level programming language was developed by a team led by John Backus at IBM in the mid 1950s and called Fortran, for formula translation. Programmers could write instructions such as x = (a + b)*c, and the compiler would then determine the necessary machine language instructions to be executed. Fortran became extremely popular and is still widely used for scientific computing today. Soon after Fortran was established, the programming language ALGOL was developed by an international group of academic computer scientists. Although ALGOL had many nicer programming constructs than Fortran, it never achieved the latter’s success, mainly because Fortran was designed to be highly efficient from its inception, and ALGOL was not.44 However, many of the innovations of ALGOL, such as the notions of block structure and recursion, influenced later versions of Fortran as well as the design of subsequent programming languages.45 One of these was C, which was developed by Bell Labs in the 1970s, and emerged as the lingua franca of computing in the 1980s. In this chapter, we briefly discuss the status of support for IEEE arithmetic by several programming languages, specifically Fortran, C, MATLAB, Java, Python and Julia, all of which are extensively used for floating point computation.