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