Home > Uncategorized > ALGEC: ALGorithmic language for EConomic problems

ALGEC: ALGorithmic language for EConomic problems

I have been reading about ALGEC, the computer language invented in the Soviet Union during the early 1960s, courtesy of a translation of the article Report on the Working Sessions of the Group on Algorithmic Languages for Processing Economic Information (GAIAPEI) by Rand.

The Soviet Union ran a command economy and the job of computers was obviously to process economic information.

The language is based on Algol 60, the default base language for the design of most establishment driven programming languages.

Since the Soviets were the only country to build a computer that used ternary logic, I was hoping that the language would include support for this ‘feature’. No such luck.

Two features caught by attention:

  • Keywords can be written in a form that denotes their gender and number. For instance, Boolean can be written: логическое (neuter), логический (masculine), логическая (feminine) and логические (plural).
  • The keyword for the go to token is to. There is obviously something about the use of Russian that makes it obvious that the word go should not be part of this keyword.

Do readers know of any other computer language which have been influence by features of the designers native human language (apart, obviously from all the English derived computer languages)?

  1. No comments yet.
  1. No trackbacks yet.