Mathematics " Automatic Programming

Since the development of FORTRAN fifteen years ago we have observed a steady growth in the development of that part of computer science that deals with programming. In particular, there has been an outstanding development in programming languages: we can say more—and in a more natural fashion—to the computer and its attendant service programs to get our tasks accomplished. Our programming languages have grown more sophisticated—more attuned to the classes of algorithmic tasks we have set ourselves—and more selective, as we have come to be able to define classes of computations we will often do. Thus FORTRAN has spawned both PL/I and BASIC. The former has generalized the primitive concepts of FORTRAN'S data and control and the latter has distilled from FORTRAN its simplest and most important essentials. Not only have the tasks influenced the languages, but also the hardware and the modes of use thereby engendered have influenced the languages. In PL/I the issues of programmer management of program execution are raised, e.g., in ON conditions and parallel execution. However, the extensions notwithstanding, PL/I is still directed at the same style of programming algorithms in existence as FORTRAN: PL/I is a summation of a decade of enormous experience. This style of programming and the languages used have opened up a number of interesting areas for study and research: