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:
“I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“History takes time.... History makes memory.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)