Third-generation programming language

A third-generation programming language
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

(3GL) is a refinement of a second-generation programming language

Second-generation programming language

Second-generation programming language is a generational way to categorise assembly languages. The term was coined to provide a distinction from higher level third-generation programming languages such as COBOL and earlier machine code languages. Second-generation programming languages have the...

. The second generation of programming languages brought logical structure to software. The third generation brought refinements to make the languages more programmer-friendly. This includes features like improved support for aggregate data types, and expressing concepts in a way that favours the programmer, not the computer (e.g. no longer needing to state the length of multi-character (string) literals in Fortran). A third generation language improves over a second generation language by having the computer take care of non-essential details, not the programmer. "High level language" is a synonym for third-generation programming language.

First introduced in the late 1950s, Fortran

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

, ALGOL

ALGOL

ALGOL is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in the mid 1950s which greatly influenced many other languages and became the de facto way algorithms were described in textbooks and academic works for almost the next 30 years...

, and COBOL

COBOL

COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments....

are early examples of this sort of language.

Most popular general-purpose languages today, such as C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

, C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

, C#, Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

, BASIC

BASIC

BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....

and Delphi

Object Pascal

Object Pascal refers to a branch of object-oriented derivatives of Pascal, mostly known as the primary programming language of Embarcadero Delphi.-Early history at Apple:...

, are also third-generation languages.

Most 3GLs support structured programming

Structured programming

Structured programming is a programming paradigm aimed on improving the clarity, quality, and development time of a computer program by making extensive use of subroutines, block structures and for and while loops - in contrast to using simple tests and jumps such as the goto statement which could...

See also