to execution, so such programs run as rapidly as though they were written directly in machine language. The first commercial programmer was probably Grace Hopper (1906-92), an American. After programming an experimental computer at Harvard University, she worked on the UNIVAC I and II computers and developed a commercially usable high-level programming language called FLOWMATIC. To facilitate computer use in scientific applications, IBM then developed a language that would simplify work involving complicated mathematical formulas. Begun in 1954 and completed in 1957, FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) was the first comprehensive high-level programming language that was widely used. In 1957, the Association for Computing Machinery set out to develop a universal language that would correct some of FORTRAN's perceived faults. A year later they released ALGOL (ALGOrithmic Language), another scientifically oriented language; widely used in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, it has since been superseded by newer languages, while FORTRAN continues to be used because of the huge investment in existing programs. COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language), a commercial and business programming language, concentrated on data organization and file handling and is widely used today in business. BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was developed at Dartmouth College in the early 1960s for use by nonprofessional computer users. The language came into almost universal use with the microcomputer explosion of the 1970s and 1980s. Condemned as slow, inefficient, and inelegant by its detractors, BASIC is nevertheless simple to learn and easy to use. Because many early microcomputers were sold with BASIC built into the hardware (in ROM memory) the language rapidly came into widespread use. As a very simple example of a BASIC program, consider the addition of the numbers 1 and 2, and the display of the result. This is written as follows (the numera...
