History
The earliest programming concepts analogous to libraries were intended to separate data definitions from the program implementation. JOVIAL brought the "COMPOOL" (Communication Pool) concept to popular attention in 1959, although it adopted the idea from the large-system SAGE software. Following the computer science principles of separation of concerns and information hiding, "Comm Pool's purpose was to permit the sharing of System Data among many programs by providing a centralized data description."
COBOL also included "primitive capabilities for a library system" in 1959, but Jean Sammet described them as "inadequate library facilities" in retrospect.
Another major contributor to the modern library concept came in the form of the subprogram innovation of FORTRAN. FORTRAN subprograms can be compiled independently of each other, but the compiler lacks a linker. So prior to the introduction of modules in Fortran-90, type checking between subprograms was impossible.
Finally, historians of the concept should remember the influential Simula 67. Simula was the first object-oriented programming language, and its classes are nearly identical to the modern concept as used in Java, C++, and C#. The class concept of Simula was also a progenitor of the package in Ada and the module of Modula-2. Even when developed originally in 1965, Simula classes could be included in library files and added at compile time.
Read more about this topic: Library (computing)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)