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: Mary Textbook by Reidar Conradi & Per Holager.

Compilers was made for SM-4 and (Kongsberg Gruppen) Norsk Data Nord-10/ND-100 computers. Runit implemented a CHILL programming language compiler implemented in Mary which ran on ND-100 and had Intel 8086 and 80286 targets. When this compiler was ported to the VAX platform, a common backend for Mary and CHILL was implemented. Later, backends for i386 and SPARC were available. SInce the Mary compiler was implemented in Mary, it was possible to run the compiler on all these platforms.

Mary is no longer mantained.