Speedcoding

<p>Speedcoding, Speedcode or SpeedCo was the first <a href="/facts/High-level_programming_language/smjECUhx">high-level programming language</a> created for an <a href="/facts/IBM/QszA7nwd">IBM</a> computer. The language was developed by <a href="/facts/John_W._Backus/pqELHDh6">John W. Backus</a> in 1953 for the <a href="/facts/IBM_701/6ngzwkFp">IBM 701</a> to support computation with <a href="/facts/Floating_point/eIckahxe"> floating point numbers</a>.
</p><p>The idea arose from the difficulty of programming the <a href="/facts/IBM_SSEC/hofkk46I">IBM SSEC</a> machine when Backus was hired to calculate astronomical positions in early 1950.
The speedcoding system was an <a href="/facts/Interpreter_(computing)/JB85fbyb">interpreter</a> 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. The interpreter took 310 memory words, about 30% of the memory available on a 701.
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Speedcoding open-in-new

Speedcoding