Which one among the following computer languages is the oldest?

Correct — D, Fortran. Fortran was developed at IBM by a team under John Backus and released in 1957, making it the oldest of the four and one of the oldest high-level languages still in use. Prolog followed in 1972, born out of work on logic programming in Marseille. C++ began as Bjarne Stroustrup's extension of C at Bell Labs at the end of the 1970s and was released commercially in 1985. Java came last, published by Sun Microsystems in 1995. Ordering them by date gives Fortran, Prolog, C++, Java, so the oldest is Fortran.

• (a)Prolog — Dates from 1972 and is a logic-programming language associated with artificial intelligence work. Old, but fifteen years younger than Fortran.
• (b)C++ — Grew out of C at Bell Labs from 1979 and was released in 1985. It is a general-purpose object-oriented language, and it postdates both Fortran and Prolog by a wide margin.
• (c)Java — Released in 1995 and the newest of the four. Its design goal of running the same compiled code on any platform belongs to the internet era, three decades after Fortran.

High-level programming languages began in the 1950s as a way of writing instructions in something closer to mathematics than to machine code. Fortran, short for formula translation, was the first widely used one and was aimed at scientific and engineering calculation; it is still used for numerical work and weather modelling. COBOL followed in 1959 for business data processing, LISP in 1958 for symbolic computation, and the family tree branches steadily after that — C in the early 1970s, C++ and object orientation in the 1980s, Java and the web languages in the 1990s.

The item is pure chronology, and the safest anchor is the decade rather than the exact year: Fortran belongs to the 1950s, Prolog to the 1970s, C++ to the 1980s and Java to the 1990s. Even a candidate unsure of any single date can rank them by what each language was built for — machine-era numerical computation, then logic programming, then object-oriented systems programming, then platform-independent internet software. That ordering matches the dates and gives the same answer.

• Fortran was released by IBM in 1957 and was designed for scientific and engineering computation.
• Prolog dates from 1972 and is a logic-programming language.
• C++ was developed from C at Bell Labs from 1979 and released in 1985.
• Java was released by Sun Microsystems in 1995.
• COBOL, another 1950s language, was created for business data processing.

• Assuming the most familiar name is the oldest; Java is the newest of the four.
• Confusing C with C++ — C dates from the early 1970s, C++ from 1979 onwards.
• Treating Prolog as recent because it is associated with artificial intelligence, a subject now in the news.

A pure chronology item on computer languages; ranking by the decade each language belongs to is enough to answer it.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following programming languages was designed primarily for business data processing?

  • (a)Fortran
  • (b)COBOL
  • (c)Prolog
  • (d)Java

  Answer(b) COBOL — common business-oriented language, developed at the end of the 1950s for commercial data processing.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  A program that translates the whole of a high-level language source program into machine code before execution is called

  • (a)an interpreter
  • (b)a compiler
  • (c)an assembler
  • (d)a loader

  Answer(b) a compiler — an interpreter instead translates and executes the program line by line.