On the implementation of the IAL
Robert M. Graham · Preprints of papers presented at the 14th national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery on - ACM '59 · 1959
When the Michigan Algorithmic Decoder (MAD) was started it was intended to be an exact implementation of the IAL. As the project developed several serious difficulties were encountered. Thus MAD (now being checked out) differs from IAL in several respects. One of our prime objectives was to keep the translation time as small as possible. The majority of University problems are not run on a production basis. On the average there is probably one translation for every execution. A translator which takes several minutes to translate a problem which takes twenty seconds to run is not very practical for a university installation.The following discussion of the differences does not mention restrictions or omissions which can be added later, e.g., MAD has no D0 statement (in the IAL sense), but it can be added at any time.