On the design of a special‐purpose scientific programming language
John C. Knight, Douglas D. Dunlop · Software Practice and Experience · 1983
Abstract Observations on the design of the special‐purpose scientific programming language SL/1 are presented. SL/1 is intended for applications programming of the Control Data Corporation Cyber 203, a very high‐performance vector processor, which is mainly used for scientific computation. The language design has been heavily influenced by the hardware characteristics of this machine and the needs of the Cyber 203 user community. Various aspects of the design of SL/1 are discussed and measurements of their use are presented. In addition, unexpected similarities between the resulting design of SL/1 and the design of FORTRAN are examined and several reasons for the continued widespread use of FORTRAN are suggested.