Plankalkül (German, "Plan Calculus") is a computer language developed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse. Zuse is believed to have designed it between 1942 and 1946 but did not publish at that time owing to a combination of factors such as conditions in wartime and postwar Germany and his efforts to commercialise the Z3 computer and its successors. The Plankalkül was first published in 1972 and the first compiler for it was implemented in 2000 by the Free University of Berlin, five years after Zuse's death. German (called Deutsch in German; in German the term germanisch is equivalent to English Germanic), is a member of the western group of Germanic languages and is one of the worlds major languages. ... A computer language is a language used by, or in association with, computers. ... Konrad Zuse (June 22, 1910 - December 18, 1995) was a German engineer and computer pioneer. ... 1942 was a common year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1946 was a common year starting on Tuesday. ... Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 18 km (60,000 ft) into the air. ... Konrad Zuses Z3 computer was the first working freely programmable, fully automatic machine, which attributes have often been the exact ones used as criteria in defining a computer. ... 1972 was a leap year that started on a Saturday. ... 2000 is a leap year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Free University of Berlin (German Freie Universität Berlin) is a university in Berlin, Germany. ...

Zuse claimed that it was the first high level non-Von Neumann programming language to be designed for a computer. It included assignment statements, subroutines, conditional statements, iteration, floating point arithmetic, arrays, hierarchical record structures, assertions, exception handling, and other advanced features such as goal-directed execution. If Zuse's claims are in fact correct, then Plankalkül was the world's first-to-be-conceived high-level programming language (and indeed, the first modern programming language at any level above manual plug-insertion/toggle switching or raw machine code). A high-level programming language is a programming language that is more user-friendly, to some extent platform-independent, and abstract from low-level computer processor operations such as memory accesses. ... The term von Neumann language refers to those programming languages which are high-level abstract isomorphisms of von Neumann architectures. ... An alternate rewrite has been has been proposed. ... In computer science, a subroutine (function, procedure, or subprogram) is a sequence of code which performs a specific task, as part of a larger program, and is grouped as one, or more, statement blocks; such code is sometimes collected into software libraries. ... A floating-point number is a digital representation for a number in a certain subset of the rational numbers, and is often used to approximate an arbitrary real number on a computer. ...

The example below shows a program which computes the maximum of three variables by calling the function max :

 P1 max3 (V0[:8.0],V1[:8.0],V2[:8.0]) => R0[:8.0] max(V0[:8.0],V1[:8.0]) => Z1[:8.0] max(Z1[:8.0],V2[:8.0]) => R0[:8.0] END P2 max (V0[:8.0],V1[:8.0]) => R0[:8.0] V0[:8.0] => Z1[:8.0] (Z1[:8.0] < V1[:8.0]) -> V1[:8.0] => Z1[:8.0] Z1[:8.0] => R0[:8.0] END 

Although it was far ahead of its time, the Plankalkül was marred by an idiosyncratic notation using multiple lines; strangely, it shares that affliction with Frege's Begriffsschrift of 1879 (dealing with mathematical logic). This page is a candidate to be moved to Wiktionary. ... Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (November 8, 1848 - July 26, 1925) was a German mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is regarded as a founder of both modern mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. ... Begriffsschrift is the name of a book on logic by Gottlob Frege published in 1879. ... 1879 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... Mathematical logic is a discipline within mathematics, studying formal systems in relation to the way they encode intuitive concepts of proof and computation as part of the foundations of mathematics. ...

References

• Zuse, Konrad (1972). Der Plankalkül. Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung. Nr. 63, BMBW - GMD - 63, 1972.
• Giloi, Wolfgang, K. (1997). Konrad Zuse's Plankalkül: The First High-Level "non von Neumann" Programming Language. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997. (Online version) (http://csdl.computer.org/comp/mags/an/1997/02/a2017abs.htm)
• Rojas, Raúl, et al. (2000). Plankalkül: The First High-Level Programming Language and its Implementation. Institut für Informatik, Freie Universität Berlin, Technical Report B-3/2000.

See also

• Timeline of programming languages
• List of programming languages

This is a chronological list of programming languages. ... Other listings of programming languages are: Categorical list of programming languages Generational list of programming languages Chronological list of programming languages Note: Esoteric programming languages have been moved to the separate List of esoteric programming languages. ...

External links

• Plankalkuel Report (http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Programme/Plankalkuel/Plankalkuel-Report/Plankalkuel-Report.htm)