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Corrected the spelling of "William F. Schmitt" in the infobox -- he's the same William Schmitt who authored the sources, he refers to himself in first person in "The UNIVAC SHORT CODE" |
JohnGDallman (talk | contribs) Improved the English a little. |
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{{Short description|Early higher-level language for electronic computers}}
{{about|the early computer language Short Code|the use of this term in connection with telecommunications|Short code}}
{{Infobox programming language
| name = Short Code
| paradigm =
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| influenced = [[Intermediate programming language]], [[OMNIBAC Symbolic Assembler]]
}}
'''Short Code''' was one of the first higher-level languages
==History==
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While Short Code represented expressions, the representation itself was not direct and required a process of manual conversion. Elements of an expression were represented by two-character codes and then divided into 6-code groups in order to conform to the 12-byte words used by BINAC and Univac computers.<ref>Schmitt, William F. The UNIVAC SHORT CODE. Annals of the History of Computing (1988) 10:page 15.</ref> For example, the expression
<syntaxhighlight lang="c">
a = (b + c) / b * c
</syntaxhighlight>
was converted to Short Code by a sequence of substitutions and a final regrouping:
<syntaxhighlight lang="c">
X3 = ( X1 + Y1 ) / X1 * Y1 substitute variables
X3 03 09 X1 07 Y1 02 04 X1 Y1 substitute operators and parentheses.
07Y10204X1Y1 group into 12-byte words.
0000X30309X1
</syntaxhighlight>
Along with basic [[arithmetic]], Short Code allowed for branching and calls to a library of functions. The language was [[interpreter (computing)|interpreted]] and ran about 50 times slower than [[machine code]].<ref>Malik, Masud Ahmad. Evolution of the High Level Programming Languages: A Critical Perspective. ACM SIGPLAN Notices (December 1998) 33(12) page 74.</ref>
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