Speedcoding: Difference between revisions

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The idea arose from the difficulty of programming the [[IBM SSEC]] machine when Backus was hired to calculate astronomical positions in early 1950.<ref>{{cite web |title= Oral History of John Backus |author= Interviewed by Grady Booch |date= September 5, 2006 |work= Reference number: X3715.2007 |publisher= [[Computer History Museum]] |url= http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Backus_John/Backus_John_1.oral_history.2006.102657970.pdf |accessdate= April 23, 2011 }}</ref>

The speedcoding 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. 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>Emerson W. Pugh, Lyle R. Johnson, John H. Palmer, ''IBM's 360 and early 370 systems'', MIT Press, 1991, {{ISBN |0-262-16123-0}}, p. 38</ref> The interpreter took 310 memory words, about 30% of the memory available on a 701.<ref name="ibmj"/>

==See also==