Programming Language Concept (2)

Book : Concept of Programming Language

Page 107
Review Question
1.In what year was Plankalkul designed?In what year was that design published?
Plankalkul was designed in 1945, published in 1972.

2.Mention an interesting feature of Zuse’s programs.
Inclusion of mathematical expressions showing the current relationships between program
variables.

3.What does Plankalkul means?
Program Calculus.

4.Speedcoding was invented to overcome two significant shortcomings of the computer hardware of the early 1950s. What were they?
Two significant shortcomings in 1950’s that was overcome by Speedcoding were lacking of floating-point arithmetic operations and lacking of indexing of some sort to allow the convenient use of arrays.

5.What is the number of bits in a single word of the UNIVAC I’s memory?How are they grouped?
Words of UNIVAC I’s memory had 72 bits, grouped as 12 six-bit bytes.

8.Who developed short code?Why is short code called automatic programming?
Short code was developed by John Mauchly. It was called automatic programming because it simplified the programming process although spent more execution time.

10.What was the most significant feature added to Fortran I to get Fortran II?
The most significant feature added to Fortran I to get Fortran II is the independent compilation of subroutines.

11.What control flow statements were added to Fortran IV to get Fortran 77?
Character string handling, logical loop control statement and an if without an optional else clause were added to Fortran IV to get Fortran 77.

12.Which version of Fortran was the first to have any sort of dynamic variables?
Fortran 90 is the first version of Fortran which support dynamic variables.

13.Which version of Fortran was the first to have character string handling?
The first version of Fortran supporting character string handling is Fortran 77.

14.Why were linguists interested in artificial intelligence in the late 1950s?
Because they were concerned with natural language processing, when in 1950’s, there are only computers with computation based on numeric data in arrays.

16.In what way are Scheme and Common LISP opposites of each other?
Scheme is characterized by its small size and its exclusive use of static scoping, while Common LISP is characterized by its large and complex language, but has pure LISP basis and allowance to both static scoping and dynamic scoping.

17.What dialect of LISP is used for introductory programming courses at
some universities?
Scheme is mostly used for courses in functional programming.

18.What two professional organizations together designed ALGOL 60?
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and German acronym for Society for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (GAMM) are the two companies which started to design ALGOL 60
PS

Page 109
Problem Set
2.Determine the capabilities of Short Code, and compare them with those of contemporary programmable hand calculator.
Short Code is capable of making multiplication without multiplication code needed, just put two operands side-by-side. Besides, it also uses pure interpreter to run itself. Comparing to a contemporary programmable hand calculator, surely Short Code will do the calculations slower than the calculator because Short Code uses interpreter. Short Code offers simpler syntax to do multiplication, however.

9.Why did Fortran allow names that began with I,J,K,L,M,N as implicitly integer type?
Because in that day, scientist often used the variable I,J,K to refer to their integer in their work in science. Moreover, Fortran was built for scientific application, therefore, in order to give more comforts to users (scientists), it allows those variables.

10.The most important new developments of ALGOL 60 are:
a.The concept of block structure was introduced
b.Two different means of passing parameters to subprograms were allowed : pass by value and pass by name
c.Procedures were allowed to be recursive
d.Stack-dynamic arrays were allowed

11.Was IBM’s assumption, on which it based its decision to develop PL/I, correct, given the history of computers and language developments since 1964?
The assumption is correct because in that 1970’s, PL/I is widely used for both business and scientific applications although it suffers a lot in previous years and afterwards.

15.Are there any nonprocedural programming languages other than Prolog?
Yes there are some nonprocedural languages other than Prolog, for example, Visual Basic, SQL.

25.Give a brief general description of the Java Servlet.
Servlet is an instance of a Java class that resides on and is executed on a Web server system for form processing purpose and database access purpose. The execution of servlet is requested by a markup document displayed by Web browser. Then the request is processed by servlet container in the Web server. Lastly, the output of it is returned to the Web browser again.