Programming Languages: Concepts and Implementation

1.5 Factors Influencing Language Development

Surprisingly enough, programming languages did not historically evolve based on the abilities of programmers (Weinberg 1988). (One could argue that programmers’ abilities evolved based on the capabilities and limitations of programming languages.) Historically, computer architecture influenced programming language design and implementation. Use of the von Neumann architecture inspired the design of many early programming languages that dovetailed with that model. In the von Neumann architecture, a sequence of program instructions and program data are both stored in main memory. Similarly, the languages inspired by this model view variables (in which to store program data) as abstractions of memory ...