AMBIT is a historical
programming language that was introduced by
Carlos Christensen
Carlos may refer to:
Places
;Canada
* Carlos, Alberta, a locality
;United States
* Carlos, Indiana, an unincorporated community
* Carlos, Maryland, a place in Allegany County
* Carlos, Minnesota, a small city
* Carlos, West Virginia
;Elsewhe ...
of
Massachusetts Computer Associates in 1964 for
symbolic computation
In mathematics and computer science, computer algebra, also called symbolic computation or algebraic computation, is a scientific area that refers to the study and development of algorithms and software for manipulating mathematical expressions ...
.
[Carlos Christensen: ''Examples of Symbol Manipulation in the AMBIT Programming Language''. in ''ACM '65: Proceedings of the ACM '65 conference. 1965, pp. 247-261.]
The language was influenced by
ALGOL 60
ALGOL 60 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1960'') is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them, representing a k ...
and is an early example of a
pattern matching language for manipulation of
strings
String or strings may refer to:
*String (structure), a long flexible structure made from threads twisted together, which is used to tie, bind, or hang other objects
Arts, entertainment, and media Films
* ''Strings'' (1991 film), a Canadian anim ...
(a more popular example from the same time is
SNOBOL).
The acronym AMBIT stands for "Algebraic Manipulation by Identity Translation", but has also claimed "Acronym May Be Ignored Totally".
AMBIT had dialects for manipulation of
lists
A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to:
People
* List (surname)
Organizations
* List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America
* SC Germania List, German rugby unio ...
(AMBIT-L)
[Michael S. Wolfberg: ''Fundamentals of the AMBIT/L list-processing language'', Proceedings of the symposium on two-dimensional man-machine communication. October 1972] and
graphs
Graph may refer to:
Mathematics
*Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges
**Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties
*Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discre ...
(AMBIT-G)
[Carlos Christensen: ''An Example of the Manipulation of Directed Graphs in the AMBIT/G Programming Language'', in Melvin Klerer et al: ''Interactive Systems for Experimental Applied Mathematics'', Academic Press, 1968, pp. 423-435.]
Both pioneered with
data structure diagrams and
visual programming
In computing, a visual programming language (visual programming system, VPL, or, VPS) is any programming language that lets users create programs by manipulating program elements ''graphically'' rather than by specifying them ''textually''. A VP ...
as data and patterns were used to be represented by directed-graph diagrams.
AMBIT/L was implemented for a
PDP-10 computer and used to implement the interactive algebraic manipulation system IAM.
[Carlos Christensen, Michael Karr: ''IAM, a system for interactive algebraic manipulation''. Proceedings of the second ACM symposium on Symbolic and algebraic manipulation. ACM, 1971]
Literature
* Carlos Christensen, Michael S. Wolfberg, Michael J. Fischer: ''A Report on AMBIT/G'' (Volume I-IV), Massachusetts Computer Associates Inc. 1971
References
Programming languages created in 1964
Visual programming languages