Autocode

AutocodeAutocode is the name of a family of "simplified coding systems", later called programming languages, devised in the 1950s and 1960s for a series of digital computers at the Universities... is the name of a family of “simplified coding systems”, later called programming languages, devised in the 1950s and 1960s for a series of digital computers at the Universities of Manchester, Cambridge and London. AutocodeAutocode is the name of a family of "simplified coding systems", later called programming languages, devised in the 1950s and 1960s for a series of digital computers at the Universities... was a generic term; the autocodes for different machines were not necessarily closely related as are, for example, the different versions of the single language Fortran.

Today the term is used to refer to the family of early languages descended from the Manchester Mark 1 autocoder systems, which were generally similar. In the 1960s, the term autocoders was used more generically as to refer to any high-level programming language using a compiler. Examples of languages referred to as autocodes are COBOL and Fortran.

The first autocodeAutocode is the name of a family of "simplified coding systems", later called programming languages, devised in the 1950s and 1960s for a series of digital computers at the Universities... and its compiler were developed by Alick Glennie in 1952 for the Mark 1 computer at the University of Manchester and is considered by some to be the first compiled programming language. His main goal was increased comprehensibility in the programming of Mark 1 machines, which were known for their particularly abstruse machine code. Although the resulting language was much clearer than the machine code, it was still very machine dependent.
Below is an example of Glennie’s AutocodeAutocode is the name of a family of "simplified coding systems", later called programming languages, devised in the 1950s and 1960s for a series of digital computers at the Universities... function which calculates the formula: {\displaystyle f(t)={\sqrt {|t|}}+5t^{3}}.

c@VA t@IC x@½C y@RC z@NC
INTEGERS +5 →c           # Put 5 into c
      →t                 # Load argument from lower accumulator to variable t
   +t     TESTA Z        # Put |t| into lower accumulator
   -t
          ENTRY Z
SUBROUTINE 6 →z          # Run square root subroutine on lower accumulator
                         # value and put the result into z
  +tt →y →x              # Calculate t^3 and put it into x 
  +tx →y →x
+z+cx   CLOSE WRITE 1    # Put z + (c * x) into lower accumulator and return