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PL/I was released in 1965 and it was designed during 1964, i.e. much later than ALGOL and LISP. Moreover, it has been explicitly designed with the purpose of c
by adrian_b 1y ago
PL/I was released in 1965 and it was designed during 1964, i.e. much later than ALGOL and LISP.
Moreover, it has been explicitly designed with the purpose of combining the best features of ALGOL, FORTRAN and COBOL. It has also added heap-based dynamic memory allocation like in LISP, but for deterministic behavior it has introduced the equivalent of "malloc" and "free", instead of using a garbage collector (manual memory allocation management is thus younger than both the use of garbage collectors and of reference counting, both of which have been in use since 1960).
Therefore PL/I is clearly a language derived from ALGOL and LISP, besides FORTRAN and COBOL. PL/I is also one of the 3 sources from which the C language has inherited, besides BCPL and ALGOL 68.
RPG (Report Program Generator, 1959) is indeed old, but it is a special-purpose programming language, like SQL, not a general-purpose programming language.
I have never encountered NEWP, but AFAIK it is a much more recent language, from the seventies.
While almost all general-purpose programming languages designed after 1960 have incorporated the features introduced by ALGOL and LISP, such as block structure with local variables dynamically-allocated in a stack, allowing reentrancy and recursivity, and also with heap-allocated variables without restrictions on the freeing order, there have also been various languages with limited purpose, which have been kept intentionally very simple, by omitting many of the features of standard programming languages. However for such more recent simplified languages, omitting features has been a design target, while in the languages from the fifties such features were missing not because they were not desired, but because it was not yet clear how to implement them.
- pjmlp 1y agoNEWP is from the early 1960's, it is the evolution of ESPOL used in Burroughs, released in 1961. As for the rest, I hardly consider 1960's languages, only a decade older than original ALGOL and LISP, when most knowledge sharing was only done via conferences, scientific papers, or people moving between universities and companies research labs that much different, in age and industry impact they contributed to. On the other hand, we are still fighting to get mainstream systems programing as safer as those languages in late 1950's, early 1960's, allowed for. Or as interactive as LISP for that matter, including the whole jump into debugger and redo kind of workflow.