Internal, External, and Pragmatic Influences: Technical Perspectives in the Development of Programming Languages

摘要

This paper reviews key issues likely to shape the design and development of programs and programming languages as efficiency constraints relax and computational power increases. These issues are; (1) the use of the dictions of mathematics to define operations that can be used to achieve user-defined desires and expectations concerning an intended application; (2) techniques for designing and producing the expected results: the use of very-high-level programming languages for prototyping; the development of application-oriented languages; the design of applications using standard operations; and the development of a library of modules which handle substantial fragments of important applications; and (3) a language's usefulness, i.e., its general nature and its user-oriented features. (Author)