Mary (programming language)

Mary is a rather obscure programming language perpetrated by RUNIT at Trondheim, Norway in the 1970s. It was what would now be called Object-oriented in the tradition of Simula, but in some ways remained quite a low level language.

Expressions were constructed using the conventional infix operators, but all of them had the same precedence and evaluation went from left to right unless there were brackets. Assignment looked particularly odd to most programmers, with the destination on the right, since assignment was just another operator.

There were several language features that appear to have existed to allow programmers to produce reasonably well optimised code with what must have been a very primitive code generator in the compiler. These included operators similar to the += et alter in C and explicit register declarations for variables.

A book describing Mary was printed in 1974. It is possible there existed working (though not quite complete) compilers for two different Norwegian built minicomputers at that time.

Mary is currently mantained by Kvatro Telecom AS.