The treatment of data types in EL1

  • Authors:
  • Ben Wegbreit

  • Affiliations:
  • Harvard Univ., Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • Communications of the ACM
  • Year:
  • 1974

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Abstract

In constructing a general purpose programming language, a key issue is providing a sufficient set of data types and associated operations in a manner that permits both natural problem-oriented notation and efficient implementation. The EL1 language contains a number of features specifically designed to simultaneously satisfy both requirements. The resulting treatment of data types includes provision for programmer-defined data types and generaic routines, programmer control over type conversion, and very flexible data type behavior, in a context that allows efficient compiled code and compact data representation.