PAL, the Pedagogic Algorithmic Language, is a
programming language developed at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in around 1967 to help teach programming language semantics and design.
[John M. Wozencraft and Arthur Evans, Jr. ''Notes on Programming Linguistics''. Unpublished report, Department of Electrical Engineering, MIT. February, 1971.] It is a "direct descendant" of
ISWIM and owes much of its philosophy to
Christopher Strachey
Christopher S. Strachey (; 16 November 1916 – 18 May 1975) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the founders of denotational semantics, and a pioneer in programming language design and computer time-sharing.F. J. Corbató, et al., ...
.
The initial implementation of PAL, in Lisp, was written by
Peter Landin and
James H. Morris, Jr. It was later redesigned by Martin Richards, Thomas J. Barkalow,
Arthur Evans, Jr., Robert M. Graham, James Morris, and
John Wozencraft
John McReynolds "Jack" Wozencraft (September 30, 1925 – August 31, 2009) was an electrical engineer and information theory, information theorist, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of the pioneers of coding t ...
. It was implemented by Richards and Barkalow in
BCPL
BCPL ("Basic Combined Programming Language") is a procedural, imperative, and structured programming language. Originally intended for writing compilers for other languages, BCPL is no longer in common use. However, its influence is still ...
as an intermediate-code interpreter and ran on the
IBM System/360
The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems that was announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applica ...
; this was called PAL/360.
RPAL
RPAL, the Right-reference Pedagogic Algorithmic Language, is a functional subset of PAL with an implementation on SourceForge.
It is used at the
University of Florida to teach the construction of programming languages and
functional programming. Programs are strictly functional, with no sequence or
assignment operations.
References
{{Reflist
Programming languages created in 1967
Academic programming languages
Functional languages