COBOL (common business oriented language) has been heavily used by businesses since its inception in 1959. A committee of computer manufacturers and users and U.S. government organizations established CODASYL (Committee on Data Systems and Languages) to develop and oversee the language standard in order to ensure its portability across diverse systems.
COBOL uses an English-like notation—novel when introduced. Business computations organize and manipulate large quantities of data, and COBOL introduced the record data structure for such tasks. A record clusters heterogeneous data such as a name, ID number, age, and address into a single unit. This contrasts with scientific languages, in which homogeneous arrays of numbers are common. Records are an important example of “chunking” data into a single object, and they appear in nearly all modern languages.
SQL (structured query language) is a language for specifying the organization of databases (collections of records). Databases organized with SQL are called relational because SQL provides the ability to query a database for information that falls in a given relation. For example, a query might be “find all records with both last_name Smith and city New York.” Commercial database programs commonly use a SQL-like language for their queries.
BASIC (beginner’s all-purpose symbolic instruction code) was designed at Dartmouth College in the mid-1960s by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. It was intended to be easy to learn by novices, particularly non-computer science majors, and to run well on a time-sharing computer with many users. It had simple data structures and notation and it was interpreted: a BASIC program was translated line-by-line and executed as it was translated, which made it easy to locate programming errors.
Its small size and simplicity also made BASIC a popular language for early personal computers. Its recent forms have adopted many of the data and control structures of other contemporary languages, which makes it more powerful but less convenient for beginners.
About 1970 Niklaus Wirth of Switzerland designed Pascal to teach structured programming, which emphasized the orderly use of conditional and loop control structures without GOTO statements. Although Pascal resembled ALGOL in notation, it provided the ability to define data types with which to organize complex information, a feature beyond the capabilities of ALGOL as well as FORTRAN and COBOL. User-defined data types allowed the programmer to introduce names for complex data, which the language translator could then check for correct usage before running a program.
During the late 1970s and ’80s, Pascal was one of the most widely used languages for programming instruction. It was available on nearly all computers, and, because of its familiarity, clarity, and security, it was used for production software as well as for education.
Logo originated in the late 1960s as a simplified LISP dialect for education; Seymour Papert and others used it at MIT to teach mathematical thinking to schoolchildren. It had a more conventional syntax than LISP and featured “turtle graphics,” a simple method for generating computer graphics. (The name came from an early project to program a turtlelike robot.) Turtle graphics used body-centred instructions, in which an object was moved around a screen by commands, such as “left 90” and “forward,” that specified actions relative to the current position and orientation of the object rather than in terms of a fixed framework. Together with recursive routines, this technique made it easy to program intricate and attractive patterns.
Hypertalk was designed as “programming for the rest of us” by Bill Atkinson for Apple’s Macintosh. Using a simple English-like syntax, Hypertalk enabled anyone to combine text, graphics, and audio quickly into “linked stacks” that could be navigated by clicking with a mouse on standard buttons supplied by the program. Hypertalk was particularly popular among educators in the 1980s and early ’90s for classroom multimedia presentations. Although Hypertalk had many features of object-oriented languages (described in the next section), Apple did not develop it for other computer platforms and let it languish; as Apple’s market share declined in the 1990s, a new cross-platform way of displaying multimedia left Hypertalk all but obsolete .