A fifth-generation programming language (5GL) is any

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

based on problem-solving using constraints given to the program, rather than using an

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...

written by a programmer. Most constraint-based and logic programming languages and some other

declarative language In computer science, declarative programming is a programming paradigm—a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs—that expresses the logic of a computation without describing its control flow. Many languages that a ...

s are fifth-generation languages.

History

While

fourth-generation programming language A fourth-generation programming language (4GL) is any computer programming language that belongs to a class of languages envisioned as an advancement upon third-generation programming languages (3GL). Each of the programming language generations a ...

s are designed to build specific programs, fifth-generation languages are designed to make the computer solve a given problem without the programmer. This way, the user only needs to worry about what problems need to be solved and what conditions need to be met, without worrying about how to implement a routine or algorithm to solve them. Fifth-generation languages are used mainly in

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...

research. OPS5 and Mercury are examples of fifth-generation languages,E. Balagurusamy, ''Fundamentals of Computers'', Mcgraw Hill Education (India), 2009, , p. 340 as is ICAD, which was built upon Lisp. KL-ONE is an example of a related idea, a frame language. In the

1980 Events January * January 4 – U.S. President Jimmy Carter proclaims a grain embargo against the USSR with the support of the European Commission. * January 6 – Global Positioning System time epoch begins at 00:00 UTC. * January 9 – In ...

s, fifth-generation languages were considered to be the way of the future, and some predicted that they would replace procedural programming with constraint based programming for all tasks that could be framed as a series of logical constraints. Most notably, from 1982 to 1993,

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...

put much research and money into their fifth-generation computer systems project, hoping to design a massive computer network of machines using these tools. However, as larger programs were built, the flaws of the approach became more apparent. It turns out that, given a set of constraints defining a particular problem, deriving an efficient algorithm to solve it is a very difficult problem in itself. This crucial step cannot yet be automated and still requires the insight of a human programmer.

Common misconception

Vendors have been known on occasion to advertise their languages as 5GL. Most of the time they actually sell 4GLs with a higher level of automation and

knowledge base A knowledge base (KB) is a technology used to store complex structured and unstructured information used by a computer system. The initial use of the term was in connection with expert systems, which were the first knowledge-based systems. ...

. Because the hype of the 1980s faded away and the projects were eventually all dropped, 5GL awareness has also dropped; this has opened doors to the vendors to re-use the term in marketing their new tools, without causing much controversy among the current generations of programmers.

Previous-generation languages

First-generation programming language A first-generation programming language (1GL) is a machine-level programming language. A first generation (programming) language (1GL) is a grouping of programming languages that are machine level languages used to program first-generation com ...

* Second-generation programming language * Third-generation programming language *

Fourth-generation programming language A fourth-generation programming language (4GL) is any computer programming language that belongs to a class of languages envisioned as an advancement upon third-generation programming languages (3GL). Each of the programming language generations a ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fifth-Generation Programming Language Programming language classification

History

Common misconception

Previous-generation languages

See also

References