Choosing the right language will help you develop test programs more quickly, and will make them easier to maintain down the road. I n the early days of computer-based testing, test engineers did not have a lot of programming choices. Assembly-language programs were fast and gave them complete control of the hardware, but they were difficult to develop. In the mid-1980s, C became a popular programming language for test and measurement applications.
C programs run faster, too.
This was more of a factor back in the 1980s. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, graphical-programming environments began to appear. In many ways, graphical-programming environments make it even easier to develop test programs. For example, designing a graphical user interface for a test program is a snap with these environments. Today, test engineers have many different choices for developing test programs.