Examples of autocodes are [[COBOL]] and [[Fortran]].<ref name=kleith2>{{cite book|last=London|first=Keith|title=Introduction to Computers|year=1968|publisher=Faber and Faber Limited|___location=24 Russell Square London WC1|isbn=0571085938|page=186|chapter=4, Programming|quote=Two high level programming languages which can be used here as examples to illustrate the structure and purpose of autocodes are COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) and FORTRAN (Formular Translation).}}<!--The book has no ISBN number, instead it has an SBN number. There is no typo in the prior sentence.--></ref>
The first high-level programming language designed for computers was [[Plankalkül]], created by [[Konrad Zuse]].<ref>{{ill|Wolfgang Giloi{{!}}Giloi, Wolfgang, K.|de|Wolfgang Giloi}} (1997). "Konrad Zuse's Plankalkül: The First High-Level "non von Neumann" Programming Language". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 17–24, April–June, 1997. [http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/85.586068 (abstract)]</ref> However, it was not implemented in his time, and his original contributions were largely isolated from other developments due to [[World War II]], aside from the language's influence on the "Superplan" language by [[Heinz Rutishauser]] and also to some degree [[ALGOL]]. The first significantly widespread high-level language was [[Fortran]], a machine-independent development of IBM's earlier [[Autocode]] systems. The [[ALGOL]] family, with [[ALGOL 58]] defined in 1958 and [[ALGOL 60]] defined in 1960 by committees of European and American computer scientists, introduced [[recursion]] as well as [[nested functions]] under [[lexical scope]]. ALGOL 60 was also the first language with a clear distinction between [[call by value|value]] and [[call by name|name-parameter]]s and their corresponding [[Semantics (computer science)|semantics]].<ref>Although it lacked a notion of [[call by reference|reference-parameter]]s, which could be a problem in some situations. Several successors, including [[ALGOL W]], [[ALGOL 68]], [[Simula]], [[Pascal (programming language)|Pascal]], [[Modula]] and [[Ada (programming language)|Ada]] thus included reference-parameters (The related C-language family instead allowed addresses as <code>value</code>-parameters).</ref> ALGOL also introduced several [[structured programming]] concepts, such as the <code>while-do</code> and <code>if-then-else</code> constructs and its [[Syntax (programming languages)|syntax]] was the first to be described in formal notation – ''[[Backus–Naur form]]'' (BNF). During roughly the same period, [[COBOL]] introduced [[Record (computer science)|record]]s (also called structs) and [[Lisp (programming language)|Lisp]] introduced a fully general [[lambda abstraction]] in a programming language for the first time.
