| Paradigm | structured, generic |
|---|---|
| Designed by | John Backus |
| Developer | John Backus and IBM |
| First appeared | 1953 |
| Typing discipline | strong, static, manifest |
| Influenced by | |
| Assembly language, machine code | |
| Influenced | |
| Fortran, ALGOL 58, BASIC, C, PL/I, PACT I, MUMPS, Ratfor | |
Speedcoding, Speedcode or SpeedCo was the first high-level programming language[a] created for an IBM computer.[1] The language was developed by John W. Backus in 1953 for the IBM 701 to support computation with floating point numbers.[2]
The idea arose from the difficulty of programming the IBM SSEC machine when Backus was hired to calculate astronomical positions in early 1950.[3] The speedcoding 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. Speedcoding was also the first implementation of 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.[4] The interpreter took 310 memory words, about 30% of the memory available on a 701.[1]
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