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 Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specificat ...

written by a programmer. Most constraint-based and

logic programming Logic programming is a programming paradigm which is largely based on formal logic. Any program written in a logic programming language is a set of sentences in logical form, expressing facts and rules about some problem domain. Major logic pro ...

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 re ...

research.

OPS5 OPS5 is a rule-based or production system computer language, notable as the first such language to be used in a successful expert system, the R1/XCON system used to configure VAX computers. The OPS (said to be short for "Official Production Sy ...

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 A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping ...

KL-ONE KL-ONE (pronounced "kay ell won") is a knowledge representation system in the tradition of semantic networks and frames; that is, it is a frame language. The system is an attempt to overcome semantic indistinctness in semantic network represent ...

is an example of a related idea, a

frame language Frames are an artificial intelligence data structure used to divide knowledge into substructures by representing " stereotyped situations". They were proposed by Marvin Minsky in his 1974 article "A Framework for Representing Knowledge". Frames are ...

. In the 1980s, 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 north ...

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 The label of second-generation programming language (2GL) is a generational way to categorize assembly languages. The term was coined to provide a distinction from higher level machine independent third-generation programming languages (3GLs) (su ...

Third-generation programming language A third-generation programming language (3GL) is a high-level computer programming language that tends to be more machine-independent and programmer-friendly than the machine code of the first-generation and assembly languages of the second-gene ...

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