Category:ALGOL-M: Difference between revisions

[[ALGOL]] for microcomputers (specifically the 8080), developed in 1976-77 by John P. Flynn and Mark S. Moranville as their master's thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School. Although modeled after [[ALGOL 60]], there was no attempt to make it a formal subset of that seminal language. However, the basic structure of ALGOL-M was similar enough to ALGOL-60 to allow simple conversion of programs from one language to the other. This was considered particularly useful in view of the fact that the standard publication language at that time was ALGOL 60, and there existed a large body of application programs and library procedures which could easily be converted to execute under ALGOL-M. Input/Output was loosely modeled after that of [[ALGOL-W]]. In place of ALGOL 60's REAL data type for floating point computations, ALGOL-M provided a DECIMAL floating point data type offering up to 15 digits of precision. The standard functions (SQRT, SIN, ENTIER, etc) of ALGOL 60 were unfortunately omitted. Parameters to user-defined functions and procedures were passed by value. Arrays, sadly, could not be passed as parameters.