The FORTRAN automatic coding system

  • Authors:

  • J. W. Backus;R. J. Beeber;S. Best;R. Goldberg;L. M. Haibt;H. L. Herrick;R. A. Nelson;D. Sayre;P. B. Sheridan;H. Stern;I. Ziller;R. A. Hughes;R. Nutt

  • Affiliations:

  • Internat'l Business Machines Corp., New York, N. Y.;Internat'l Business Machines Corp., New York, N. Y.;Mass. Inst. Tech., Computation Lab., Cambridge, Mass.;Internat'l Business Machines Corp., New York, N. Y.;Internat'l Business Machines Corp., New York, N. Y.;Internat'l Business Machines Corp., New York, N. Y.;Internat'l Business Machines Corp., New York, N. Y.;Internat'l Business Machines Corp., New York, N. Y.;Internat'l Business Machines Corp., New York, N. Y.;Internat'l Business Machines Corp., New York, N. Y.;Internat'l Business Machines Corp., New York, N. Y.;Univ. of California, Livermore, Calif.;United Aircraft Corp., East Hartford, Conn.

  • Venue:
  • IRE-AIEE-ACM '57 (Western) Papers presented at the February 26-28, 1957, western joint computer conference: Techniques for reliability
  • Year:
  • 1957

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Abstract

The FORTRAN project was begun in the summer of 1954. Its purpose was to reduce by a large factor the task of preparing scientific problems for IBM's next large computer, the 704. If it were possible for the 704 to code problems for itself and produce as good programs as human coders (but without the errors), it was clear that large benefits could be achieved. For it was known that about two-thirds of the cost of solving most scientific and engineering problems on large computers was that of problem preparation. Furthermore, more than 90 per cent of the elapsed time for a problem was usually devoted to planning, writing, and debugging the program. In many cases the development of a general plan for solving a problem was a small job in comparison to the task of devising and coding machine procedures to carry out the plan. The goal of the FORTRAN project was to enable the programmer to specify a numerical procedure using a concise language like that of mathematics and obtain automatically from this specification an efficient 704 program to carry out the procedure. It was expected that such a system would reduce the coding and debugging task to less than one-fifth of the job it had been.