A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century || The Early Development of Programming Languages**The preparation of this paper has been supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant No. MCS 72-03752 A03, by the Office of Naval Research contract N00014-76-C-0330, and by IBM Corporation. The authors wish to thank the originators of the languages cited for their many helpful comments on early drafts of this paper.††Reprinted from J. Belzer, A. G. Holzman, and A. Kent (eds.), “Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology,” Vol. 6, pp. 419–493. Dekker, New York, 1977. Courtesy of Marcel Dekker, Inc.