Essay/Term paper: Computer languages

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Information Technology

Computer Languages


By Nicholas Soer

Differences in computer languages is a topic that many people are not
familiar with. I was one of those kinds of people before I started researching
on this topic. There many different computer languages and each one of them are
similar in some ways, but are also different in other ways, such as: program
syntax, the format of the language, and the limitations of the language.

Most computer programmers start programming in languages such as turbo
pascal or one of the various types of basic. Turbo pascal, Basic, and Fortran
are some of the oldest computer languages. Many of today's modern languages
have been a result of one of these three languages, but are greatly improved.
Both turbo pascal and basic are languages that are easy to understand and the
syntax is very easy and straightforward. In Basic when printing to the screen
you simply type the word 'print', in turbo pascal you would type 'writeln'.
These are very simple commands that the computer executes. To execute a line of
code in a language such as C, or C++, you would have to type in much more
sophisticated lines of code that are much more confusing than the previous two.

The format and layout of the various languages are very diverse between
some, and between others are somewhat similar. When programming in Basic the
user has to type in line numbers before each new line of code. In an updated
version of Basic called QBasic, numbers are optional. Turbo pascal does not
allow the user to input numbers, it has preset commands that seperate each part
of the program. This is similar to QBasic, but is much more sophisticated.
Instead of using the command gosub in Basic, the user would make a procedure
call.

Another new language is C. C is a spinoff of turbo pascal but is
capable of doing more things than turbo. The format and layout are similar, but
the syntax is much more complex than turbo is. When C first came out, there
were many major flaws in the language so a new version had to be put out, C++.
The main addition from C to C++ is the concept of classes and templates. Many
other small flaws were fixed when this new version of C came out also.

Many of the languages have different limitations on the tasks that they
came perform. The newer the language, the more things you can do. Things that
are being accomplished today, were thought to have been impossible 20 years ago.
Despite the differences between the many languages I have mentioned, and the
others that I have not, the limitations are starting to go higher and higher as
technology improves.

This is a subject that one could write on and on about the minute
differences between the many languages. After researching these main languages
I found out that there are just as many simmilarities between languages as there
are differences.