What programming language is close to english

[vladtess]

Hey guys,

I have a project to do and i need a source (a web page) that shows that programming languages were once close to English.

I remember once reading a page on wikipedia that said that one programmers had to type "MULTIPLY" instead of '*' to tell the compiler to multiply. What language was that?

Thank you so much guys,

Vladimir Tess

[ixmatus]

Uhm, close to English? Programming languages aren't close to any natural language - really; all the ones I have heard of may use English terms for constructs and reserved names, but they don't use any specific natural language...

The one language I have encountered that comes closest to a natural language (which I am assuming is what you are asking) has been Python which is actually interpreted. You may be hard pressed to find an effective compiled language that closely resembles a natural language...

Python example:

print "Hello World"

C example:

#include<stdio.h>

main()
{
    printf("Hello World");
}

While both simplistic examples (neither demonstrates code flow), I think you can appreciate the differences. Look up 'scripting languages' and it should give you quite a bit more information on other languages similar to Python (ie interpreted and not compiled).

Note: languages now, are closer to natural language than they used to be. Programming in Assembler is far from anything like English!

Hope that helps!

[UHF]

Welcome to the Dark Ages. Your talking about COBOL - COBOL - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It was designed for non-scientific business people to program, hence the English.

[Dharma]

And thank God, COBOL has the COMPUTE function so you don't have to use MULTIPLY, ADD and so forth.

[codefreeze]

BASIC is pretty close.

[YazKMan]

I think BASIC and COBOL may be as close as you're going to get. English is simply to complicated of a language with so many rules that it simply isn't practical to have a programming language that resembles it.

[seeker5]

Originally Posted by YazKMan

I think BASIC and COBOL may be as close as you're going to get. English is simply to complicated of a language with so many rules that it simply isn't practical to have a programming language that resembles it.

While ADA doesn't have the words "multiply", it was a programming language designed by the Military so that the code could be easier to read and check by someone knowing English. My experience has been that the easier the language is to read, the harder and more time consuming it is to write. And vice versa - languages easier to write are harder to read.

[Ramsus]

Try this list from Wikipedia, it includes some interesting languages like the Shakespeare programming language.

Although if you're trying to show that programming languages started out very similar to english and evolved away over time, I think you're going to have trouble, because that's really not what happened. Assembly is really the grandfather of all programming languages, and it bears only a passing resemblance to English, before Assembly was just machinecode, which is just ones and zeros.

[Addict]

I remember once reading a page on wikipedia that said that one programmers had to type "MULTIPLY" instead of '*' to tell the compiler to multiply. What language was that?

Wow. You know, I would figure for people who aren't technical it would be easier to type 1 character instead of 8. I also don't know anyone would writes out MULTIPLY on paper. That's just ridiculous.