FORTRAN was one of the first high-level programming languages. FORTRAN is an acronym for FORmula TRANslation system. FORTRAN was designed by John Backus at IBM in nineteen fifty-four, and it was a landmark for the computing industry. The language appeared in a time when computers still had very small memories and were slow. These computers ran using very primitive operating systems. During this time making a language

to program in machine code was impossible, so FORTRAN used an assembly language. An assembly language is language of words, so each computer required a different program. The language caught quickly because programs that ran important equipment, like a nuclear reactor, took only days to program instead of weeks and required less programming knowledge, making the software less likely to fail or crash. The success of FORTRAN was phenomenal and because of this success, FORTRAN II was released in nineteen fifty-eight (Ritchie 2). FORTRAN II added many improvements over FORTRAN. One the most notable was the ability to separate the compilation of the program modules. This allowed assembly language modules to be linked to FORTRAN modules. The very same year, FORTRAN III was developed but was never released to the public. FORTRAN III was to add the ability to include assembly code inside of FORTRAN code, improving efficiency in some cases. Nineteen sixty-one saw the release of FORTRAN IV. This release was a reorganization of FORTRAN code. Statements like common and equivalence were improved. Improvements in FORTRAN IV caused incompatibility with earlier code written for FORTRAN II. In May of nineteen sixty-two, the American National Standards Institute, or the ANSI committee started developing a standard for FORTRAN. This would be the first standard to be published for any computer language. Also in ninety sixty-two, computer manufacturers started including FORTRAN on all the new computers produced. This helped FORTRAN reach more people across the United States. A FORTRAN standard was finally released in nineteen sixty-six. Since then, two more standards have been released. The first was in nineteen ninety and added long awaited changes to the language. The second appeared in nineteen ninety-five. The next volume is to be released later this year, and will be under the title, FORTRAN 2000. The developers of FORTRAN developed many features that are found in nearly every programming language. FORTRAN was the first to have what was commonly known as “block if statements” or also called “if then else” statements (Stroustrup 1). It was also the first to have a prechecking “while loop“. Before the while loop statement, all loops were postchecking loops meaning the code was executed at least once. To stop this the programmer would have to have an if statement before the loop to stop it from even executing the first time. FORTRAN also introduced the character storage variable. Before this, all characters were stored within an integer variable or as a number (Ritchie 2).

C++ has come to be the dominant language on the market in only a few short years because of its new and refreshing changes. C++ is a direct descendent of the C language and was first seen in the nineteen eighties. In the period since, C++ has advanced from a small instrument that a research laboratory programmer built for himself and some colleagues into the worldwide object-oriented language of choice for numerous generations of programmers. Dr. Stroustrup designed C++ in nineteen eighty-three. He decided, instead of building a new language from the ground up, to port C++ from the C language, meaning that when a C++ source code was compiled it was changed into C so it was compatible with all C compatible computers. In nineteen eighty-nine the ANSI, or the American National Standards Institute; BSI, or the British Standards Institute; ISO, or the International Standards Institute; and the DIN, roughly translated as the German Standards Institute, started to design a C++ standard. Since nineteen ninety-seven C++ has had a published standard definition. There are C++ compilers for practically every computer and operating system, and C++ now enjoys the distinction of being the language with which most modern mini- and microcomputer applications are written (Stevens and Walnum 3). The name C++ was derived by Rick Mascitti in the

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