A brief description of JOVIAL
Thomas E. Cheatham · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · 1978
JOVIAL (Jules' Own Version of the International Algebraic Language) was one of the first programming languages developed primarily to aid in programming large complex real time systems. Today it remains a major language for these applications and versions of JOVIAL have been implemented on dozens of different computers. The language and its compilers have been developed primarily by the Systems Development Corporation. JOVIAL was based on Algol-58 but includes numerous features not in Algol (58 or 60) which make it particularly useful for programming large scale systems. The most important of these is the COMPOOL (communications POOL), a central repository of data descriptions which permits programmers to reference data items without concerns as to how they are represented on some particular computer.