ABSTRACT
Early computers were very dicult to program. In fact, programming some of the earliest computers consisted of designing and building circuits to carry out the computations required to solve each new problem. Later, computer instructions could be coded in a language that the machine could understand. But these codes were very cryptic, and programming was therefore very tedious and error prone. Computers would not have gained widespread use if it had not been for the development of high-level programming languages that made it possible to enter instructions using an English-like syntax.
