Software and Programming Languages

Many languages may be used to describe the non-executable form of software, for example using English for a design specification, FORTRAN for computer programming, and hexadecimal for a derivative of the source code. The dominant requirement for a programming language is that it should facilitate in the production of reliable, maintainable software, within an acceptable time and at an acceptable cost. However the organization of input and output routines, the general control of peripheral equipment, the tracking of store allocation, the updating of loop counts and the manipulation of subroutines can all give problems when programming a large software system in a low level language. Although there are many high level programming languages most have many more similarities than differences. It is a descendant of the programming language SIMULA and the language flexible extensible language which Kay had developed as a simulation language. Pascal was also one of the first programming languages to support the concept of strongly typed data.