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I have been asked for these kind of languages, my first naive attempt brought two list

List A)

A programming language based on constraints rather than algorithms to solve the problems. eg. Prolog

List B)

A programming language that contain visual tools to help develop a program. eg. VB

Digging deeply into the internet I feel the first one is more accurate, but the second is still appearing into the results.

So my question is: What are fifth generation programming languages? The first kind or the second?

I would appreciate any links, articles or any other useful resource to understand more about the topic.

EDIT

I'm bringing this to the main question:

Oscar: I've also found references to Prolog, Scheme, Heskell, Lisp while searching on the topic? Are these "more" 5th or are those like VB.

Charlie Martin: Well, Lisp can't really be a 5th gen language because it's older than everything except, maybe, FORTRAN. And Scheme is a dialect of Lisp. But yeah, I've seen functional languages -- Haskell, ML, Erlang, etc -- called 'fifth generation' –

So, is there a chance for constraint based programming languages be called 5th gen?

Thanks.

Community
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OscarRyz
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2 Answers2

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"Fifth generation programming languages" was an attempt to push logic programming, constraint programming, and satisfaction/unification based programming (like Prolog). Golly, that must have been back in the 80's. There was a big Japanese initiative, back when we thought Japan was Taking Over and Buying Everything.

The usual list of generations is:

  1. Straight machine language, Goldstein and von Neumann
  2. Assembly languages
  3. "High level" languages, starting with FORTRAN, LISP, and COBOL.
  4. Either report-generator languages like RPG, or OO programming
  5. Fifth generation

The terminology is pretty well out of favor today, I think.

Charlie Martin
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  • +1 - 4GL is a more-or-less meaningful term in that one can fairly clearly identify a genre of languages (Synon, Oracle Forms, Informix etc.) that would be generally described as 4GL's. Fifth generation language was just the name used to promote the project in Japan. – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells Mar 13 '09 at 23:12
  • I've also found references to Prolog, Scheme, Heskell, Lisp while searching on the topic? Are these "more" 5th or are those like VB. – OscarRyz Mar 13 '09 at 23:16
  • Well, Lisp can't really be a 5th gen language because it's older than everything except, maybe, FORTRAN. And Scheme is a dialect of Lisp. But yeah, I've seen functional languages -- Haskell, ML, Erlang, etc -- called 'fifth generation' – Charlie Martin Mar 13 '09 at 23:19
  • If I remember correctly there were some Prolog variants (parallel and such) which where funded under the Japanese project. Not much came out of it. – starblue Mar 14 '09 at 06:55
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To your "off topic" question. I am certainly not an expert in this field, but in my experience C# has an extensive resource of developmental Aids like visual development etc, very similar to VB and im pretty sure there are some great free ones out there. As far as Java goes, I am not to competent in that language but I don't remember it being very visual, but definitely more similar to flash then PHP forsay.

Anthony
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