Are Fortran, Cobol, Basic and Forth high level programming languages?

Question

Are Fortran, Cobol, Basic and Forth high level programming languages?

And if not, what where the first high level programming languages?

Which were the first object-oriented languages?

Answer 1

High-level isn't a binary value. There are a whole range of languages in a spectrum from low-level to high-level.

The languages you named are higher level than assembly, but lower level than Lisp.

According to Wikipedia:

The first high-level programming language to be designed for a computer was Plankalkül, created by Konrad Zuse.

Answer 2

Fortran - first high level programming language.

Simula - first object-oriented language.

Answer 3

"High-level" can have different meanings -- some languages are at higher-levels than others, abstracting farther away from the machine. The original FORTRAN was delivered in 1957 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran) and was, AFAIK, the first implemented language at a higher level than assembly. Other languages since then can be classified as higher-level. For example, the current Fortran standard, Fortran 2003, has a much higher level of abstraction than the original FORTRAN, providing array operations, some OO features, etc.

Answer 4

COBOL and FORTRAN (as they are now) as higher level than C. The abstraction of underlying machine is greater. One should expect a COBOL program - even of considerable complexity - to compile on Windows or *Nix without alteration. The same is true of Fortran (though my knowledge is more out of date here).

The latest versions of COBOL are very high level - see managed cobol here: http://knol.google.com/k/alex-turner/micro-focus-managed-cobol/2246polgkyjfl/4#

Please note - I work for a COBOL company - Micro Focus. This might mean my input is biased :)

Answer 5

The first OO language was probably Simula, though not many people knew it until Smalltalk came along.

Answer 6

As for your last question:

Among the first object oriented programming languages was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simula

The first more or less popular object-oriented language was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk

Answer 7

They do since they hide computer hardware abstraction, so they can be considered as high-level.

The first object-oriented language was SmallTalk, according to Wikipedia.

Answer 8

CoBOL is technically considered a "high-level" language. It has some functions, and does some elements of memory management. But in the scale of languages, I'd rank it about half of a step above assembler. This is my approximation from my experience with all of these, please edit the response if you want to contribute some more languages.

• 0 - Binary machine code
• 0.5 - Assembler
• 1.0 - CoBOL, Fortran, Pascal, C
• 1.5 - C++
• 2.0 - VB6
• 2.5 - C#, VB .Net, Java, etc
• 3.0 - Javascript, CSS, SQL

Answer 9

It's all relative. C is low level for those who write Python, C++ for Java developers and so on.

As for the OP's question, yes Fortran is certainly high level. Modern Fortran is almost like MATLAB.