Editing Computer programming (section)

===Compiler languages===
{{See also|Compiler}}
[[High-level language]]s made the process of developing a program simpler and more understandable, and less bound to the underlying [[Computer hardware|hardware]]. 
The first compiler related tool, the [[A-0 System]], was developed in 1952<ref>{{cite book |last1=Ridgway|first1=Richard|title=Proceedings of the 1952 ACM national meeting (Toronto) on - ACM '52 |chapter=Compiling routines |date=1952|pages=1–5|doi=10.1145/800259.808980|isbn=9781450379250|s2cid=14878552|doi-access=free}}</ref> by [[Grace Hopper]], who also coined the term 'compiler'.<ref name="wikles1968">[[Maurice V. Wilkes]]. 1968. Computers Then and Now. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, 15(1):1–7, January. p. 3 (a comment in brackets added by editor), "(I do not think that the term compiler was then [1953] in general use, although it had in fact been introduced by Grace Hopper.)"</ref><ref name="computerhistory.org">[http://www.computerhistory.org/events/lectures/cobol_06121997/index.shtml] The World's First COBOL Compilers   {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111013021915/http://www.computerhistory.org/events/lectures/cobol_06121997/index.shtml|date=13 October 2011}}</ref> [[FORTRAN]], the first widely used high-level language to have a functional implementation, came out in 1957,<ref name = bergstein>{{cite web|url=https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna17704662|title=Fortran creator John Backus dies |last=Bergstein|first=Brian|date=2007-03-20|website=NBC News|url-status= live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200429211030/http://www.nbcnews.com/id/17704662|archive-date=2020-04-29 |access-date=2010-04-25}}</ref> and many other languages were soon developed—in particular, [[COBOL]] aimed at commercial data processing, and [[Lisp (programming language)|Lisp]] for computer research.

These compiled languages allow the programmer to write programs in terms that are syntactically richer, and more capable of [[abstraction (computer science)|abstracting]] the code, making it easy to target varying machine instruction sets via compilation declarations and [[Heuristic (computer science)|heuristics]]. Compilers harnessed the power of computers to make programming easier<ref name = bergstein/> by allowing programmers to specify calculations by entering a formula using [[infix notation]].