CORAL66 programming language

From Free net encyclopedia

Revision as of 20:15, 5 April 2006; view current revision
←Older revision | Newer revision→

CORAL (Computing Online Realtime Algorithmic Language) was developed in 1966 at the Royal Radar Establishment (RRE), Malvern, UK by I. F. Currie and M. Griffiths.

CORAL 66 is a general purpose programming language based on Algol 60, with some features from CORAL 64, JOVIAL, and FORTRAN. Like Edinburgh IMP it allows embedded assembler, and also offered good run-time checking and diagnostics. The language uses reserved keywords stropped by single quotes, such as 'BEGIN'. While the syntax is slightly reminiscent of Pascal, in some ways it is more like FORTRAN than Algol, in that recursive procedures are not supported.

Intended for real-time applications, the language was an inter-service standard for British military programming, and was also widely adopted for civil purposes in the British control and automation industry. It was used to write software for both the Ferranti and GEC computers from 1971 onwards. Implementations also exist for the Interdata 8/32, PDP-11, VAX and Alpha processors; for the Honeywell, and for the Computer Technology Limited (CTL) Modular-1; as well as for SPARC running Solaris and Intel running Linux.

Source code for a CORAL 66 compiler (written in BCPL) has been recovered and the "Official Definition of CORAL 66" document by HMSO has been scanned; the Ministry of Defence patent office has agreed to issue a licence to allow us to put both the code and the language reference online for non-commercial use. This should become available in May 2006.

[edit]

External links

Retrieved from "http://www.netipedia.com/index.php/CORAL66_programming_language"