SIGPLAN

The term ALGOL is reported to have sprung from “ALGOrithmic Language”. Many forget, however, that ALGOL is the second brightest star in the constellation Perseus and part of an eclipsing binary. ALGOL exhibits a variation in light, which is caused by ...

History is contextual. The Algol* development was a product, perhaps a miraculous product, of its time. All developments proceed, almost implacably, from the primitive to the rococco, e.g. from Algol58 through Algol60 to Algol68 with an appearance of a ...

In preparing this account of some of the developments leading to ALGOL 60 I have primarily sought to present such relevant information that is readily available to myself, but not otherwise accessible or well known. In addition I have tried to answer ...

APL is a general-purpose programming language with the following characteristics (reprinted from APL Language [4]):

The primitive objects of the language are arrays (lists, tables, lists of tables, etc.). For example, A+B is meaningful for any arrays A ...

This paper is a discussion of the evolution of the APL language, and it treats implementations and applications only to the extent that they appear to have exercised a major influence on that evolution. Other sources of historical information are cited ...

APT is a programming language for describing how parts are to be produced by a numerically controlled machine tool. Within the language a programmer can define points, lines, planes, spheres, etc. and specify the movement of a cutting tool in terms of ...

The Air Force announced today that it has a machine that can receive instruction sin English, figure out how to make whatever is wanted, and teach other machines how to make it.

An Air Force general said it will enable the United States to “build a war ...

Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code or BASIC was originally developed by T. E. Kurtz and J. G. Kemeny at Dartmouth College in 1963-1964. The original version consisted of 14 statement constructs. BASIC was one of several languages operating ...

Dartmouth College is a small university dating from 1769, and dedicated “... for the education and instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes in this Land in reading, writing and all parts of learning... and also of English Youth and any others.” (...

The syntax of COBOL 60 is defined through a meta language that uses:

lower-case letters for metalinguistic variable names, upper-case letters for optional fixed words in the language, which are called “noise words”, underlined upper-case letters for ...

This paper discusses the early history of COBOL, starting with the May 1959 meeting in the Pentagon which established the Short Range Committee which defined the initial version of COBOL, and continuing through the creation of COBOL 61. The paper gives ...

The FORTRAN language was intended to be a vehicle for expressing scientific and mathematical computation, while allowing efficient object code to be produced. Since there was an emphasis on scientific computation in FORTRAN and FORTRAN II, little ...

Before 1954 almost all programming was done in machine language or assembly language. Programmers rightly regarded their work as a complex, creative art that required human inventiveness to produce an efficient program. Much of their effort was devoted ...

The General Purpose Simulation System language has been developed over many years and implemented on several different manufactures' machines. Of the two current versions, GPSS/360 models can operate with GPSS V, with some minor exemptions and ...

The General Purpose Simulation System (GPSS) is a programming system designed for the simulation of discrete systems. These are systems that can be modeled as a series of state changes that occur instantaneously, usually over a period of time. ...

JOSS is one of the earliest interactive, multi-user languages to become operational (the first demonstration was in 1963) and as such had a strong influence on many similar systems and languages which proliferated shortly thereafter. The system (...

JOVIAL (Jules' Own Version of the International Algebraic Language) was one of the first programming languages developed primarily to aid in programming large complex real time systems. Today it remains a major language for these applications and ...

The time was late 1958. Computers that those who were involved with the first JOVIAL project had been using included the JOHNNIAC (built at Rand Corporation), the IBM AN/FSQ-7 (for SAGE), 701, and 704. A few had worked with board wired calculators. Some ...

LISP data are symbolic expressions that can be either atoms of lists. Atoms are strings of letters and digits and other characters not otherwise used in LISP. A list consists of a left parenthesis followed by zero or more atoms or lists separated by ...

This paper concentrates on the development of the basic ideas and distinguishes two periods - Summer 1958 through Summer 1958 when most of the key ideas were developed (some of which were implemented in the FORTRAN based FLPL), and Fall 1958 through ...

PL/I was developed in two distinct stages. First the language NPL was conceived by a joint user-IBM committee. IBM alone then developed PL/I by clarifying and refining the rather incomplete specification of NPL. This overview describes the major ...

Source material for a written history of PL/I has been preserved and is available in dozens of cartons, each packed with memos, evaluations, language control logs, etc. A remembered history of PL/I is retrievable by listening to as many people, each of ...

SIMULA was conceived in the early sixties by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard of the Norwegian Computing Center [3 ]. The most prevalent version of the language today is SlMULA-67 [1].

SIMULA was designed for system description and system simulation. ...

The organizers of this conference have told us that we should write at least 25 pages of manuscript, but that we may produce as many pages more as we wanted. Perhaps they did not envisage the possible consequences, but we have taken their words at face ...

The SNOBOL programming languages introduced or popularized most of the concepts of character string processing. The original SNOBOL had just one data type: a string of characters. It could appear in a program as a literal delimited by quotation marks, ...

Development of the SNOBOL language began in 1962. It was followed by SNOBOL2, SNOBOL3, and SNOBOL4. Except for SNOBOL2 and SNOBOL3 (which were closely related), the others differ substantially and hence are more properly considered separate languages ...

The formal proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference are to be published in a volume containing not only the papers, but edited transcriptions of the keynote speech, the discussions following each paper, and other ...