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Concept
Autocode
Summary
Autocode is the name of a family of "simplified coding systems", later called programming languages, devised in the 1950s and 1960s for a series of digital computers at the Universities of Manchester, Cambridge and London. Autocode was a generic term; the autocodes for different machines were not necessarily closely related as are, for example, the different versions of the single language Fortran.
Today the term is used to refer to the family of early languages descended from the Manchester Mark 1 autocoder systems, which were generally similar. In the 1960s, the term autocoders was used more generically as to refer to any high-level programming language using a compiler.
Examples of languages referred to as autocodes are COBOL and Fortran.
The first autocode and its compiler were developed by Alick Glennie in 1952 for the Mark 1 computer at the University of Manchester and is considered by some to be the first compiled programming language. His main goal was increased comprehensibility in the programming of Mark 1 machines, which were known for their particularly abstruse machine code. Although the resulting language was much clearer than the machine code, it was still very machine dependent.
Below is an example of Glennie's Autocode function which calculates the formula: . The example omits necessary scaling instruction needed to place integers into variables and assumes that results of multiplication fit into lower accumulator.
c@VA t@IC x@1⁄2C y@RC z@NC
INTEGERS +5 →c # Put 5 into c
→t # Load argument from lower accumulator
to variable t
t TESTA Z # Put |t| into lower accumulator t ENTRY Z SUBROUTINE 6 →z # Run square root subroutine onlower accumulator value
and put the result into z
tt →y →x # Calculate t^3 and put it into x tx →y →x z+cx CLOSE WRITE 1 # Put z + (c * x) intolower accumulator
and return
User's manual of Glennie's Autocode Compiler mentioned that "the loss of efficiency is no more than 10%". Impact of Glennie's Autocode on other Manchester users' programming habits was negligible.Official source
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