NELIAC (was: Curricula (was: Assembly vs. Everything Else))

From: Derek Peschel <dpeschel_at_eskimo.com>
Date: Mon Aug 20 05:06:57 2001

> I've been told that LISP stands for Lots of Insane Stupid Parentheses.
> But could any language have punctuation more demented than C?

Oh, yes! Look at NELIAC. Each punctuation mark has a couple of totally
unrelated uses. Punctuation is crucial. (IF statements take an ELSE clause
marked by "IF NOT", but you can avoid typing the IF NOT, since the comma
afterward suffices to mark the ELSE clause.) To make things worse, programs
are customarily printed in a compact unindented style.

The simple reason for this is that NELIAC is ten years older than C, and
also that (according to the spec) the compiler must use a given
(simpleminded) parsing and code-generation algorithm.

NELIAC is similar to C in philosophy as well as appearance. (NELIAC
programs can do machine-dependent bit twiddling, and HELIAC can write its
own compiler, and did for a wide variety of machines.)

I find the language rather appealing, actually, although I sure wouldn't
want to use it for big projects!

The usual reference is:

AUTHOR Halstead, Maurice H. (Maurice Howard), 1918-
TITLE Machine-independent computer programming.
PUB INFO Washington, Spartan Books [1962]
DESCRIPTION 267 p. diagrs. 25 cm.
LC SUBJECTS NELIAC (Computer program language)
LCCN 62014005 /L/r84.

-- Derek
Received on Mon Aug 20 2001 - 05:06:57 BST