Program

1
Program Programming Languages
2
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.

3
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.

4
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 98991990.

5
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.

6
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.

7
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.

8
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.

9
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.

10
Algorithms and Procedures

• As algorithms are central to Matlabs
  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.

11
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.