'''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. 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. 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>Emerson W. Pugh, Lyle R. Johnson, John H. Palmer, ''IBM's 360 and early 370 systems'', MIT Press, 1991, ISBN 0262161230, p. 38</ref> The interpreter took 310 memory words, about 30% of the memory available on a 701.<ref>F. E. Allen, ''[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.84.5616&rep=rep1&type=pdf The history of language processor technology in IBM]'', IBM Journal of Research and Development, Volume 25, Issue 5 (September 1981), p. 536</ref>
