ALTEXT : A Multipurpose Processing Language
Rachel Stark · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1966
ALTEXT, a multipurpose programming language has been used extensively at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company for linguistic research and for processing textual data: for example, the conversion of orthographic form of words into corresponding phonetic forms and the formatting of the phonetic data according to source dictionary and to regional dialects [B. V. Bhimani and R. Mitchell, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 38, 934(A) (1965)], correlation studies, etc. In processing dictionary entries, an ALTEXT program required 18 min to process over 73 000 words for which the rate of processing was 8000 words/h with a COMIT program. A program that processed 2000 records with SNOBOL in 70 min was written in ALTEXT and the operating rate was increased to 10 000 records in 3.62 min. The speed of ALTEXT is a result of efficient input-output and of coding that is similar to that in assembly languages. Statements in ALTEXT consist of self-descriptive English words and algebraic expressions that resemble those in FORTRAN, making it an easy language to learn. [Work supported by Lockheed Independent Research.]