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Fortran is the first imperative high level language and it had impact on almost all the computer languages created after that.
by transhipper 6y ago
Fortran is the first imperative high level language and it had impact on almost all the computer languages created after that.
- rst 6y agoWell, certainly the first to be widely implemented. After the original Fortran for the 704, there were compilers for a bunch of other machines, not always using the "Fortran" name. And, per this article, the first to have a meaningful optimizer. (Terms such as "basic block" first occured in 1957 technical papers on its internals.) However, there were earlier languages which were at least high-level enough to support algebraic notation. Perhaps the first the compiler written by Laning and Zierler for the Whirlwind at MIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laning_and_Zierler_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laning_and_Zierler_system (which was thought for a while to have been an inspiration for Fortran -- but the head of the Fortran project, John Backus, later found notes from before Laning and Zierler published).