1. Why is it useful for a programmer to have some background in language design, even though he or she may never actually design a programming language ?
Because understanding the design of a language will help a programmer to learn about new programming, allowing the programmer to select the most suitable language for a certain project , makes a programmer able to express their ideas on programming better,
2. How can knowledge of programming language characteristics benefit the whole computing community ?
By knowing the fundamentals of a programming language, a programmer will have more vocabulary and the ability to understand a programming language. This will give an insight on what functionality of certain languages works well and what doesn’t work well. And this will allow programmers in the future to design a new language which has the good functionality of languages and get rid of the useless functionality of languages.
3. What programming language has dominated scientific computing over the past 50 years ?
FORTRAN is the language used in past 50 years for scientific applications. FORTRAN is a general purpose and imperative programming language that is suited for numeric computing and scientific computing. It was originally developed by IBM in their campus in 1950s. FORTRAN is also one of most popular languages in area of high performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world’s fastest supercomputers
4. What programming language has dominated business applications over the past 50 years ?
COBOL is the language used in past 50 years for business applications. COBOL is the second oldest high level programming language (after FORTRAN). COBOL is a language that uses english-like statements in the code. COBOL was created by comittee of private industries, universities, and government during second half of 1959.
5. What programming language has dominated artificial intelligence over the past 50 years ?
LISP is a family of computer programming languages with polish prefix notation. LISP is the second oldest high level programming language. It was specified by John McCarthy originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs in 1958. The interchangeability of code and data also gives Lisp its instantly recognizable syntax. All program code is written as s-expressions, or parenthesized lists.
6. In what language is most of UNIX written ?
The UNIX operating system was first written in assembly language, but by 1973 had been almost entirely coded in C language
7. What is the disadvantage of having too many features in a language ?
Having too many features in a language will be detrimental to programming practices. If there’s too many features then the simplicity of reading a program will be lost. And it will be more difficult to create a documentation of a language, as there is usually more than one programmer working on a program.
8. How can user-defined operator overloading harm the readibility of a program ?
User-defined operator overloading can harm the readability in case that user doesn’t realize the difference in operands and a possible confusion between functions of an operator. For example, a user defines “&” to mean the logical operator. Other person who read the program could think that & is the address of a variable just like in C. It would make the code hard to understand and even it would make a compiler catch an error when the functions of “&” gets mixed up.