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'''Speedcoding''' or Speedcode was the first higher-level language created for an IBM computer <ref> {{cite journal |last=Allen|first=F.E.|title=The History of Language Processor Technology in IBM|journal=IBM Journal of Research Development|volume=25|issue=5, September 1981}}</ref>. The language was developed by [[John Backus]] in 1953 for the [[IBM 701]] to support computation with [[floating point| floating point numbers]] <ref>{{cite book |title=Out of their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists |last=Shasha |first=Dennis |coauthors=Cathy Lazere |year=1998 |publisher=Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. |___location=New York |isbn=0-387-98269-8 }}</ref>. The system was an interpreter and focused on ease of use at the expense of system resources.
 
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. The running time of a program that was written with the help of Speedocoding was usually ten to twenty times that of machine code. It substantially reduced however the effort of writing many jobs.<Ref>Emerson W. Pugh, Lyle R. Johnson, John H. Palmer, ''IBM's 360 and early 370 systems'', MIT Press, 1991, ISBN 0262161230, p. 38</ref>
Pseudo operands for arithmetic and math functions
Conditional and unconditional branching
Auto-increment registers
Only 700 words, and very slow.
 
== Notes ==