The Overview of Programming Languages Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

The Overview of Programming Languages - Essay Example The essay "The Overview of Programming Languages" presents a brief history of programming languages and the merits and demerits of communicating with the machine. The History of Programming languages can be dated back to 1954. Ever since the idea of computing through electronic devices evolved, for many a people, it was interesting to develop new ways of automating the devices using a new subject called Programming. And to do this it has to be language that bridges man and machine. This communicating language that bridges man and machine is called â€Å"Programming language†. Today there are more than 2500 languages. Generally, programming languages are tools used to construct formal descriptions of finite computations. Each computation consists of operations that transform a given initial state into some final state. A programming language provides essentially three components for describing such computations: data types, objects, and values with operations defined upon them; rules fixing the chronological relationships among specified operations; rules fixing the structure of a program. These components together constitute the level of abstraction on which we can formulate algorithms with the help of this programming language. A programming language's surface form, that is, how programs are represented to a reader, is its syntax. Programming languages vary widely in this surface form. Most programming languages are textual. They consist of sequences of "words" and "punctuation marks", much like written natural languages.