History
The earliest imperative languages were the machine languages of the original computers. In these languages, instructions were very simple, which made hardware implementation easier, but hindered the creation of complex programs. FORTRAN, developed by John Backus at IBM starting in 1954, was the first major programming language to remove the obstacles presented by machine code in the creation of complex programs. FORTRAN was a compiled language that allowed named variables, complex expressions, subprograms, and many other features now common in imperative languages. The next two decades saw the development of a number of other major high-level imperative programming languages. In the late 1950s and 1960s, ALGOL was developed in order to allow mathematical algorithms to be more easily expressed, and even served as the operating system's target language for some computers. MUMPS (1966) carried the Imperative paradigm to a logical extreme, by not having any statements at all, relying purely on commands, even to the extent of having the IF and ELSE commands be independent of each other, and only connected by an intrinsic variable named $TEST. COBOL (1960) and BASIC (1964) were both attempts to make programming syntax look more like English. In the 1970s, Pascal was developed by Niklaus Wirth, and C was created by Dennis Ritchie while he was working at Bell Laboratories. Wirth went on to design Modula-2, and Oberon. For the needs of the United States Department of Defense, Jean Ichbiah and a team at Honeywell began designing Ada in 1978, after a 4-year project to define the requirements for the language. The specification was first published in 1983, with revisions in 1995 and 2005/6.
The 1980s saw a rapid growth in interest in object-oriented programming. These languages were imperative in style, but added features to support objects. The last two decades of the 20th century saw the development of a considerable number of such programming languages. Smalltalk-80, originally conceived by Alan Kay in 1969, was released in 1980 by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Drawing from concepts in another object-oriented language—Simula (which is considered to be the World's first object-oriented programming language, developed in the 1960s)—Bjarne Stroustrup designed C++, an object-oriented language based on C. C++ was first implemented in 1985. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the notable imperative languages drawing on object-oriented concepts were Perl, released by Larry Wall in 1987; Python, released by Guido van Rossum in 1990; Visual Basic and Visual C++ (which included MFC 2.0), released by Microsoft in 1991 and 1993 respectively; PHP, released by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994; Java, first released by Sun Microsystems in 1994 and Ruby, released in 1995 by Yukihiro “matz” Matsumoto. Microsoft's .NET (2002) is at its core imperative as are its primary target languages, VB.NET, C# and F#.
Category:Procedural programming languages lists additional imperative programming languages.
Read more about this topic: Imperative Programming
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