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Is this still a stub? Shinobu 11:36, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I need to check this, but the 1965 date for AA seems rather late. AA was designed by Tony as his response to the early Algol discussions (what I believe was informally referred to as "ALGOL 58") and was being designed and implemented in parallel with Algol60. Later note: See https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/technology/atlas50th/p002.htm - the language was designed by 1962, and was running in 1963. I'll update the main page to say 1963. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.124.38.160 ( talk) 04:49, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
There seems to be some confusion nowadays as to the meaning of the word Autocode which is not helped by its use in AA. Original autocodes were barely above the level of an assembly language - they were invented as 'automatic programming' as opposed to manual programming where you had to program in binary and lay your code out by hand on the drum in the right place to be read on the next rotation! The Manchester team had written several of these autocodes, so when Tony Brooker came up with his language, he looked on it as the next development in automatic programming. However the terminology was changing at that time and Atlas Autocode was named during the last gasp of the autocodes just as actual programming languages were coming into existence. As was said at the time, if AA had been named Atlas Algol instead it could very likely have caught on better and possibly even diverted development from the ALGOL60 to ALGOL68 path. Anyway, by the current modern understanding of the word Autocode, AA is *not* an autocode. It's a high-level language in the Algol family descended from ALGOL58 (aka IAL) rather than ALGOL60. Which is part of the reason that I think the date of 1965 is later than it should be.
Someone has broken (or entered wrongly) some of the links in the text - the Atlas Autocode Reference Manual (at least in PDF form) is at https://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/docs/Atlas_Autocode_1965.pdf but the link in the references section is to a less stringent Edinburgh publication, https://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/docs/CU-Rep-1-AA.pdf
Any language that allowed a goto does nothing to prevent a programmer from writing the most horrendous spaghetti code. However AA did have proper conditionals and loop control and gotos would be used very seldom in practice.
The last year in which Manchester University students were taught AA was around 1971/72. Students in Electrical Engineering had AA included as part of their syllabus 2.24.25.78 ( talk) 12:34, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||
|
Is this still a stub? Shinobu 11:36, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I need to check this, but the 1965 date for AA seems rather late. AA was designed by Tony as his response to the early Algol discussions (what I believe was informally referred to as "ALGOL 58") and was being designed and implemented in parallel with Algol60. Later note: See https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/technology/atlas50th/p002.htm - the language was designed by 1962, and was running in 1963. I'll update the main page to say 1963. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.124.38.160 ( talk) 04:49, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
There seems to be some confusion nowadays as to the meaning of the word Autocode which is not helped by its use in AA. Original autocodes were barely above the level of an assembly language - they were invented as 'automatic programming' as opposed to manual programming where you had to program in binary and lay your code out by hand on the drum in the right place to be read on the next rotation! The Manchester team had written several of these autocodes, so when Tony Brooker came up with his language, he looked on it as the next development in automatic programming. However the terminology was changing at that time and Atlas Autocode was named during the last gasp of the autocodes just as actual programming languages were coming into existence. As was said at the time, if AA had been named Atlas Algol instead it could very likely have caught on better and possibly even diverted development from the ALGOL60 to ALGOL68 path. Anyway, by the current modern understanding of the word Autocode, AA is *not* an autocode. It's a high-level language in the Algol family descended from ALGOL58 (aka IAL) rather than ALGOL60. Which is part of the reason that I think the date of 1965 is later than it should be.
Someone has broken (or entered wrongly) some of the links in the text - the Atlas Autocode Reference Manual (at least in PDF form) is at https://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/docs/Atlas_Autocode_1965.pdf but the link in the references section is to a less stringent Edinburgh publication, https://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/docs/CU-Rep-1-AA.pdf
Any language that allowed a goto does nothing to prevent a programmer from writing the most horrendous spaghetti code. However AA did have proper conditionals and loop control and gotos would be used very seldom in practice.
The last year in which Manchester University students were taught AA was around 1971/72. Students in Electrical Engineering had AA included as part of their syllabus 2.24.25.78 ( talk) 12:34, 3 August 2022 (UTC)