Re: Languages from the 1950s

From	gah4@u.washington.edu
Newsgroups	comp.compilers
Subject	Re: Languages from the 1950s
Date	2020-03-31 16:09 -0700
Organization	Compilers Central
Message-ID	<20-04-001@comp.compilers> (permalink)
References	<20-03-030@comp.compilers>

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On Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 9:04:52 AM UTC-7, Derek M. Jones wrote:

> I looking for manuals for languages from the 1950s,
> the earlier the better.

I first started looking for such in the 1970's, and had some
books from the library used book sale.  The only one I remember
now is JOVIAL, which I remember never knowing any computer that
ran it, but still had to book for it.  I might also have
had a book for JOSS.

It seems to me that there were a lot of machine specific
low-level languages, about at the assembly level, before the
machines were big enough to run compilers.

There is FLOW-MATIC, which Grace Hopper worked on before COBOL:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOW-MATIC

It seems to me that COBOL goes to about 1960, so doesn't qualify
as the 1950's.  AIMACO and COMTRAN were also on the pathway to COBOL.

IBM RPG also traces back to the 1950s, so that should apply.
It seems that FARGO is related to RPG.

As well as I know, Fortran from about 1956 is credited with
the idea of symbolic names more than one character long.
(Seems so obvious now.)  There is FORTRANSIT for the IBM 650,
which doesn't seem to even have a Wikipedia page.

There is FOCAL and SNOBOL from the 1960's.
COMIT is a predecessor to SNOBOL from the 1950's.

> [I presume you've looked through bitsavers. -John]

It is hard to look through bitsavers without knowing the name.
If you find some old machine, though, then you can see which languages
people ran on it.

I suspect that the languages you might actually want to know
about came in the early 1960's.

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Languages from the 1950s "Derek M. Jones" <derek@_NOSPAM_knosof.co.uk> - 2020-03-30 15:16 +0100
  Re: Languages from the 1950s anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2020-03-31 17:08 +0000
    Re: Languages from the 1950s "Derek M. Jones" <derek@_NOSPAM_knosof.co.uk> - 2020-03-31 19:27 +0100
  Re: Languages from the 1950s gah4@u.washington.edu - 2020-03-31 16:09 -0700
    Re: Languages from the 1950s "Robin Vowels" <robin51@dodo.com.au> - 2020-04-02 13:05 +1100
  Re: Languages from the 1950s "Robin Vowels" <robin51@dodo.com.au> - 2020-04-01 21:31 +1100
    Re: Languages from the 1950s "Derek M. Jones" <derek@_NOSPAM_knosof.co.uk> - 2020-04-01 17:35 +0100
  Re: Languages from the 1950s Philipp Klaus Krause <pkk@spth.de> - 2020-04-01 17:49 +0200
  Re: Languages from the 1950s rst@panix.com (Robert Thau) - 2020-05-10 00:46 +0000
    Re: Languages from the 1950s Martin Ward <martin@gkc.org.uk> - 2020-05-13 10:51 +0100
  Re: Languages from the 1950s "Robin Vowels" <robin51@dodo.com.au> - 2020-09-03 21:02 +1000

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