Jump to content

Speedcoding

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Skyerise (talk | contribs) at 22:34, 15 January 2011. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Speedcoding or Speedcode was the first higher-level language created for an IBM computer.[1] The language was developed by John Backus in 1953 for the IBM 701 to support computation with floating point numbers.[2]

The system was an interpreter and focused on ease of use at the expense of system resources. It provided pseudo-instructions for common mathematical functions: logarithms, exponentiation, and trigonometric operations. The resident software analyzed pseudo-instructions one by one and called the appropriate subroutine. Other programmer-friendly features were decimal input/output operations. Although it substantially reduced the effort of writing many jobs, the running time of a program that was written with the help of Speedcoding was usually ten to twenty times that of machine code.[3] The interpreter took 310 memory words, about 30% of the memory available on a 701.[4]

See also

References

  1. ^ Allen, F.E. "The History of Language Processor Technology in IBM". IBM Journal of Research Development. 25 (5, September 1981).
  2. ^ Shasha, Dennis (1998). Out of their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists. New York: Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. ISBN 0-387-98269-8. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  3. ^ Emerson W. Pugh, Lyle R. Johnson, John H. Palmer, IBM's 360 and early 370 systems, MIT Press, 1991, ISBN 0262161230, p. 38
  4. ^ F. E. Allen, The history of language processor technology in IBM, IBM Journal of Research and Development, Volume 25, Issue 5 (September 1981), p. 536

Further reading

  • Backus, John, "The IBM 701 Speedcoding System", Journal of the ACM (JACM), Volume 1, Issue 1 (January 1954), pp. 4-6,
  • Backus, John W. (May 1954). "IBM 701 Speedcoding and Other Automatic-programming Systems". Proc. Symp. on Automatic Programming for Digital Computer. Washington DC, The Office of Naval Research. pp. 106–113. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Sammet, Jean E. (1969). Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals. Prentice-Hall.
Stub icon

This software-engineering-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Speedcoding&oldid=408099711"