The A-0 system, written by Grace Hopper in 1951 and 1952 for the UNIVAC I, was the first compiler ever developed for an electronic computer.[1] The A-0 functioned more as a loader or linker than the modern notion of a compiler. A program was specified as a sequence of subroutines and arguments. The subroutines were identified by a numeric code and the arguments to the subroutines were written directly after each subroutine code. The A-0 system converted the specification into machine code that could be fed into the computer a second time to execute the program. The A-0 system was followed by the A-1, A-2, A-3 (released as ARITH-MATIC), AT-3 (released as MATH-MATIC) and B-0 (released as FLOW-MATIC).
Notes
- ^ Hopper "Keynote Address", Sammet pg. 12
References
- Hopper, Grace. "The Education of a Computer". Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery Conference (Pittsburgh) May 1952.
- Hopper, Grace. "Automatic Coding for Digital Computers". High Speed Computer Conference (Louisiana State University) February 1955, Remington Rand.
- Hopper, Grace. "Keynote Address". Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages (HOPL) conference.
- Ridgway, Richard E.. "Compiling Routines". Proceedings of the 1952 ACM national meeting (Toronto) ACM '52.
- Sammet, Jean (1969). Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals. Prentice-Hall, pg. 12.
