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'''Speedcoding''', '''Speedcode''' or '''SpeedCo''' was the first [[high-level programming language]]{{efn|Meaning symbolic and aimed at [[natural language]] expressiveness as opposed to [[machine language|machine]] or hardware instruction oriented coding.}} created for an [[IBM]] computer.<ref name="Allen_1981"/> The language was developed by [[John W. Backus]] in 1953 for the [[IBM 701]] to support computation with [[floating point| floating point numbers]].<ref name="Shasha-Lazere_1998"/>
The idea arose from the difficulty of programming the [[IBM SSEC]] machine when Backus was hired to calculate astronomical positions in early 1950.<ref name="Booch-Backus_2006"/>
The speedcoding system was an [[Interpreter (computing)|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.<ref name="Pugh-Johnson-Palmer_1991"/> The interpreter took 310 memory words, about 30% of the memory available on a 701.<ref name="Allen_1981"/>
==See also==
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