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198 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.213s | source
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userbinator ◴[] No.44506358[source]
Somewhat less frequently, I also hear "invoke" or "execute", which is more verbose but also more generic.

Incidentally, I find strange misuses of "call" ("calling a command", "calling a button") one of the more grating phrases used by ESL CS students.

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treyd ◴[] No.44506421[source]
I actually see the converse often with novices often, referring to statements (or even entire function decls) as "commands".
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kragen ◴[] No.44506617[source]
"Command" is a better term for what we call "statements" in imperative programming languages. "Statement" in this context is an unfortunate historical term; except in Prolog, these "statements" don't have a truth-value, just an effect. (And in Prolog we call them "clauses" instead.)
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adrian_b ◴[] No.44510711[source]
True.

In many early computer programming documents the term "order" was used instead of "statement", where "order" was meant as a synonym for "command" and not as referring to the ordering of a sequence.

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kragen ◴[] No.44511605[source]
Occasionally, but much more often (as in Mauchly's cited paper) an "order" was a machine instruction, not a high-level language "statement".
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1. adrian_b ◴[] No.44512439[source]
Yes, but that is mostly because in the first few years (including by the time of Mauchly), there were no "high-level" programming languages, so the "orders" composing the text of a program corresponded to instructions directly executable by the machine.

I believe that the term "statement" has been imposed by the IBM publications about FORTRAN, starting in 1956.

Before the first public documents about IBM FORTRAN, the first internal document about FORTRAN, from 1954, had used the terms "formula" for anything that later would be called "executable statement", i.e. for many things that would not have been called formulas either before or after that, like IF-formulas, DO-formulas, GOTO-formulas and so on, and the document had used "sentence" for what later would be called "non-executable statements" (i.e. definitions or declarations).

Before FORTRAN (1951 to 1953), for his high-level programming language Heinz Rutishauser had used the term "Befehl", which means "command". (For what we name today "program", he had used the term "Rechenplan", which means "computation plan".)