Programming Languages: History and Java Basics

COMTRAN was developed by IBM in 1957 as a competitor to FLOW-MATIC. It was designed for commercial data processing applications and influenced COBOL's development.

The ALGOL 58 programming language, originally called IAL (International Algebraic Language), was designed and proposed in the year 1958.

SQL was developed at IBM in the early 1970s, with the first commercial product (Oracle/RSI) released in 1978-1979. The language itself was designed earlier (1974), but 1978 represents its first commercial availability.

Ada was designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah under contract to the US Department of Defense, with the language standard first published in 1983. It was named after Ada Lovelace.

Haskell is a purely functional programming language named after Haskell Curry, with its first version (Haskell 1.0) released in 1990. It standardized various research in functional programming.

Lua was developed at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, first released in 1993. It was designed as a lightweight scripting language for embedding in applications. Options 1959, 1972, and 1970 are incorrect as they predate Lua's creation.

The expression 7 / (3 + 0.5) equals 7 / 3.5, which equals exactly 2.0. The presence of 0.5 in the denominator makes the entire division operation use floating-point arithmetic, so the result is 2.0, not the integer-division result 2.

The variable a is initially assigned 7, then reassigned to the value of b (which is 4), making a equal 4. Then a is incremented by 1, resulting in a final value of 5. The original value 7 is lost when a = b executes.

When a string is concatenated with integers using the + operator, Java evaluates left-to-right. First "The answer is: " + 17 produces "The answer is: 17". Then that string is concatenated with 3 to produce "The answer is: 173". Once a string enters the expression, all subsequent + operations perform string concatenation, not arithmetic addition.

When both operands are integers, Java performs integer division which truncates the decimal portion. Therefore 8 / 3 equals 2, not 2.666. The result type matches the operand types (int), so no decimal component is retained.

The modulo operator (%) returns the remainder of integer division. When 19 is divided by 4, the quotient is 4 and the remainder is 3 (since 19 = 4*4 + 3). Therefore 19 % 4 equals 3. The result is always an integer when both operands are integers.

Using raw types like List instead of parameterized generic types like List<Dog> bypasses compile-time type safety checks. Therefore, it is false to say that writing the raw type version is preferable.

John Backus led the IBM team that created FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) in 1957, the first widely used high-level programming language. John McCarthy created LISP, Alan Cooper developed Visual Basic, and Dijkstra was a pioneering computer scientist known for structured programming principles.

John McCarthy invented LISP (LISt Processing) in 1958 at MIT, primarily for AI research. John Backus created FORTRAN, Alan Cooper developed Visual Basic, and Dijkstra contributed to structured programming theory.

James Gosling developed Oak at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s, which was later renamed Java. Oak was originally designed for interactive television and smart devices before evolving into the platform-independent Java language.

Anders Hejlsberg developed Turbo Pascal at Borland and later led the creation of C# at Microsoft. Bill Joy created the vi editor and contributed to Java, Dennis Ritchie co-created C, and Ken Thompson co-created UNIX and B language.

Niklaus Wirth created Pascal in 1970 as a teaching language emphasizing structured programming and data structures. Dijkstra advocated for structured programming, McCarthy created LISP, and von Neumann was a computer architecture pioneer.

Alan Cooper developed Visual Basic, making drag-and-drop GUI programming accessible to non-programmers. Dijkstra contributed to structured programming theory, McCarthy created LISP, and Backus invented FORTRAN.

Edsger W. Dijkstra pioneered structured programming and formal methods for correct program construction. His work established principles like avoiding goto statements and proving program correctness mathematically.