236.

“Plankalkül？”

When Cheng Li saw this name, he couldn't help but be stunned for a moment, and a long-sealed memory was gradually awakened.

When he was in college, Cheng Li often dabbled in various interesting things because of his strong curiosity.

This includes the history of programming in the world.

For a long time, many people generally know that the world's first programming language is Forfran.

But in fact, the earliest programming language on the planet was a high-level programming language called Plankalkül, which was independently written by the German computer scientist Zuse in 1945.

At that time, Zuse was playing for Germany during World War II, and Germany during World War II was indeed very powerful, not only scaring the world, but also enduring the drag of pig teammates.

This included one of the earliest computer prototypes, the Z4 computer.

In addition to the Z4 computer, Germany also had another black technology at that time in World War II, that is, it was the most advanced high-level language programming field in the world at that time.

At the time, Zuse was working for World War II Germany, where he led a project team that made significant contributions to the design of computers and programming languages.

By early 1945, however, Allied bombing had destroyed a large number of German prototype computers, so Zuse moved to the remote Bavarian village of Hinterstein, and his project team members went their separate ways.

So, Zuse set out on his own to develop a language to represent computational processes on the Z4 computer, and eventually completed the development of this high-level language that year.

However, at that time, Germany was defeated in World War II, and Germany was isolated because it was feared by the mainstream Western world. It is difficult for German scientists, including all the research results in the field of computers, to reach the mainstream of the Western world.

As a result, Zuse's manuscript of the Plankalkül language design, written in 1945, was not officially published until 1972.

At that time, based on some kind of political correctness, most Western academics believed that the world's first programming was written by a team led by IBM.

But now, judging from Cheng Li's inclusion in the Ten Thousand Worlds Library of the Arithmetic Tablet.

The Plankalkül language is indeed the earliest high-level language for computer programming on the planet.

This is because the Plankalkül Language Design Manuscript is at the forefront of this computer programming language shelf, that is, the first to appear.

The Plankalkül language was designed by Zuse in 1945, and it wasn't until 15 years later that some of the features of the Plankalkül language were gradually revealed in other languages.

This shows the advanced nature of the Plankalkül language.

"Plankalkül language? ”

After recalling this history of the Plankalkül language, Cheng Li couldn't help but say.

"The Plankalkül language is quite complete as a high-level language, and I don't know how Germany managed to recruit so many talented comet-like figures to work for it during World War II. If Germany had been the first to develop the atomic bomb during World War II, the outcome of World War II would have been unclear. ”

After Cheng Li thought about it for a while, he began to open the book.

"This is the earliest programming language, so you can't stop me from reading it, right?"

Cheng Li turned the first page, and what moved him was that the annoying fog finally did not appear.

On the page, there seemed to be the fragrance of ink that had just been written, and it came towards Cheng Li, allowing Cheng Li to see the extremely clear handwriting.

"There you have it!"

Cheng Li was in good spirits, and finally had a programming language that completely introduced the design ideas of high-level language compilers.

This made Cheng Li can't help but start reading this book attentively.

And as he read the knowledge of this book in depth, Cheng Li became more and more surprised.

"It's hard to imagine that the Plankalkül language came into existence in 1945...... It has a lot of advanced features in terms of data structures, many of which didn't appear until more than a decade later. ”

Cheng Li began to analyze this language in depth.

"The simplest data type in Plankalkül is a single bit, and both integer and floating-point types are built with a single bit. The floating-point model adopts a pairwise and complementary notation method and a hidden bit scheme, which is often used to avoid storing the highest digit of the normalized decimal part of the floating-point value......"

"This is just a feature of the Plankalkül language in terms of data, and in terms of structure, the Plankalkül language contains arrays and records in addition to the commonly used scalar types, and can contain nested records......"

In terms of language specifications, the Plankalkül language does not have an explicit goto statement, but it contains an iterative statement similar to the for statement in the Ada language, and it also contains a superscript Fin command. In addition, the Plankalkül language contains a choice statement, but there is no else statement......"

Cheng Li's research has become more and more in-depth, and he has a deeper understanding of the language.

When he was on Earth, Cheng Li didn't know much about Plankalkül, or even only knew such a general name.

After all, at that time, there were already too many more advanced and convenient high-level languages in Cheng Li's era, so Plankalkül was just lying quietly in the history museum for people to admire, and even due to those historical reasons, many people did not know that Plankalkül was the world's earliest high-level programming language.

But now, Plankalkül has become the first high-level language that Cheng Li has mastered in this world.

"Funny, really funny. "One of the most interesting things about the Plankalkül language is that it uses mathematical expressions to express the relationships between program variables, which is very similar to the assertions in later JAVA languages and axiomatic semantics. ”

And the Plankalkül language, although it appeared in 1945, when computers were just being born, when the mainstream of the computer industry was still in the inefficient era of programming in binary machine language. The example program contained in Zuse's manuscript was much more complex than other programs written in machine language in 1945. ”

"As a rough estimate, if I learned the Plankalkül language, it would be a huge help to implement things like sorting arrays, testing the connectivity of graphs, performing integer and floating-point arithmetic, and syntax analysis of logical formulas with multiple different priority operators, and even designing algorithms!

In the field of programming, there is usually a saying that high-level languages are efficient in programming, but low in execution, because they have to go through the intermediate link of translation.

Binary machine language is inefficient in programming, but efficient in execution because it can be read and executed directly by a computer.

However, Cheng Li, who has a little understanding of the cultivators, knows very well that for these cultivators, there are not too many constraints on the hardware, and the problem of low programming efficiency is the problem that these cultivators need to solve the most.

In a nutshell.

Cultivators need to learn how to write formulas (programs) in high-level languages.