Introduction

Programming Language Design and Evolution (Specific and General Purpose Languages)

Many programming languages are created with a specific purpose.
- database processing.
- "artificial intelligence."
- multimedia processing.
Special-purpose languages are not used much beyond their area of specialization.
General purpose languages can be used for any task.
- Pascal: designed as a teaching language (purposefully kept simple).
- C: developed to be translated efficiently into fast machine code, with a minimum of housekeeping.
- C++: adds "object oriented programming" aspects to C.