Plankalkül
More info
- Creator
- Konrad Zuse
- Released
- Written 1942–1945, published 1972
- Type
- Programming language
The world's first high-level language, designed in an Alpine village by a man with no computer to run it on — and published twenty-seven years too late to matter.
Konrad Zuse fled Berlin in 1945 with what was left of the Z4 and spent his time in Hinterstein writing down what a real programming language ought to look like. The result had assignment, conditionals, loops, subroutines, arrays and composite record types, all built up from a single primitive: the bit. It also insisted that a variable's type be declared and checked, an idea that languages fifteen years younger still managed without.
The notation was two-dimensional and miserable to typeset: each statement spanned several stacked rows giving variable number, index and type. Assignment also ran the wrong way by modern taste, a + b ⇒ c rather than the reverse. As a demonstration Zuse wrote forty-nine pages of chess routines, making Plankalkül the first language with a chess program and Zuse the first programmer who could not test his own code.
The manuscript was published in full only in 1972, and no working compiler existed until 1975. By that point FORTRAN, ALGOL and COBOL had independently reinvented most of it. Its historical influence is zero and its historical interest is considerable, which is an unusual pairing.