Plankalkül

The plan calculus is developed by Konrad Zuse in the years 1942-1946 programming language. It was the first high-level language in the world.

Description

The programming language includes, among other assignments, function calls, conditional statements, loops, floating point arithmetic, fields, composite data types, and other advanced features such as targeted execution.

The original notation of the programs was two-dimensional: For indexes and type of information, different lines were provided. For the first real implementation in the 1990s, a linear inscription was developed.

The following example shows a program ( in a linear transcription), which calculates the maximum of three variables by calling the function max3:

P1 max3 (V0 [: 8.0 ], V1 [: 8.0 ], V2 [: 8.0 ] ) → R0 [: 8.0 ] max ( V0 [: 8.0 ], V1 [: 8.0 ] ) → Z1 [: 8.0 ] max ( Z1 [: 8.0 ], V2 [: 8.0 ] ) → R0 [: 8.0 ] END P2 max (V0 [: 8.0 ], V1 [: 8.0 ] ) → R0 [: 8.0 ] V0 [: 8.0 ] → Z1 [: 8.0 ] (Z1 [: 8.0 ] < V1 [: 8.0 ] ) → V1 [: 8.0 ] → Z1 [: 8.0 ] Z1 [: 8.0 ] → R0 [: 8.0 ] END history

Konrad Zuse used the work on the lambda calculus of Alonzo Church and Stephen Kleene in the 1930s, with the development of the plan calculus. He wanted to use the language on a successor to his Z3 computer system, but by the events of World War II, there was not to be.

Literature references can be found, although in the late 1940s, but only in 1972 the language was first released completely. As part of a dissertation Plankalkül was described in 1975 by J. Hohmann and implemented. The late 1990s was followed by independent alternative implementations (1998 and two years later another at the Free University of Berlin), including a syntax editor.

Plankalkül occurs primarily a historical significance in the area of ​​programming languages. Was not used practically the language.