In 1957, the first of the major languages appeared in the form of FORTRAN. Its name stands for FORmula TRANslating system. The language was designed at IBM for scientific computing. The components were very simple, and provided the programmer with low-level access to the computers innards. Today, this language would be considered restrictive as it only included IF, DO, and GOTO statements, but at the time, these commands were a big step forward. The basic types of data in use today got their start in FORTRAN, these included logical variables (TRUE or FALSE), and integer, real, and double-precision numbers. Though FORTAN was good at handling numbers, it was not so good at handling input and output, which mattered most to business computing. Business computing started to take off in 1959, and because of this, COBOL was developed. It was designed from the ground up as the language for businessmen. Its only data types were numbers and strings of text. It also allowed for these to be grouped into arrays and records, so that data could be tracked and organized better. It is interesting to note that a COBOL program is built in a way similar to an essay, with four or five major sections that build into an elegant whole. COBOL statements also have a very English-like grammar, making it quite easy to learn. All of these features were designed to make it easier for the average business to learn and adopt it. (Updated Aug 11 2004) In 1958, John McCarthy of MIT created the LISt Processing (or LISP) language. It was designed for Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Because it was designed for a specialized field, the original release of LISP had a unique syntax: essentially none. Programmers wrote code in parse trees, which are usually a compiler-generated intermediary between higher syntax (such as in C or Java) and lower-level code. Another obvious difference between this language (in original form) and other languages is that the basic and only type of data is the list; in the mid-1960’s, LISP acquired other data types. A LISP list is denoted by a sequence of items enclosed by parentheses. LISP programs themselves are written as a set of lists, so that LISP has the unique ability to modify itself, and hence grow on its own. The LISP syntax was known as “Cambridge Polish,” as it was very different from standard Boolean logic (Wexelblat, 177):