Table of Contents for Programming Languages: a survey
I place a language in the 'of historical interest' section if it seems to me that the language introduced important ideas or was the basis for an important language, but the language is no longer very popular (for writing new programs; there are plenty of old languages with lots of legacy code), and if it seems to me that either the language has been 'succeeded' by another, or that most of the interesting innovations in the language have been incorporated into many others.
If language still seems to me to be the best way to learn about some idea, then i did not confine it to the 'of historical interest' section, even if it is unpopular.
goals: "removing those features of (the CPL) language which make compilation difficult"
influences: CPL
people: Martin Richards
notes: predecessor of B, which led to C
goals: "B was essentially the BCPL system stripped of any component that Thompson felt he could do without" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_%28programming_language%29 )
people: Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie
influences: BCPL
attributes: typeless (everything is a word)
notes: predecessor of C
Goals: "...The language Oberon was born out of the ambition to simplify language to the essentials....Tempted to design a version of Modula stripped down to essentials, we also wanted to identify those features that were indispensable to encompass object-orientation" (cite http://www.swissdelphicenter.ch/en/niklauswirth.php )
Pros:
The minimal extensions present in Oberon for OOP are:
Oberon already has first-class functions, so 'methods' may be implemented manually by assigning function values to fields of a record.
People: Niklaus Wirth
As of this writing, the latest in Wirth's Pascal/Modula/Oberon family of languages. Latest version as of this writing: Oberon-7
Links:
Goals: "The general idea dominating the design of Pascal was to provide a language appealing to systematic thinking, mirroring conventional mathematical notation, satisfying the needs of practical programming, and encouraging a structured approach" (cite http://www.swissdelphicenter.ch/en/niklauswirth.php)
Criteria:
Historically important innovations:
Attributes:
Cons:
Influences: Algol, Fortran, Cobol ( http://www.swissdelphicenter.ch/en/niklauswirth.php )
People: Niklaus Wirth
Retrospectives:
Goals: "To create a language adequate for describing entire systems, from storage allocator to document editor, from process manager to compiler, and from display driver to graphics editor. I perceived that many problems in software development stemmed from the mixing of parts written in different languages." (cite http://www.swissdelphicenter.ch/en/niklauswirth.php) )
Historically important innovations:
People: Niklaus Wirth
Retrospectives:
Notes:
Historically important innovations:
Influences: ALGOL
Goals: discrete event simulation
People: Ole-Johan Dahl, Kristen Nygaard
Other notes:
designed by committee
Pros:
Notes:
Inspired: