Languages for direct execution
Lee W. Hoevel · 1974
The utility of a modern computing system lies in its capacity to perform a variety of transformations on input data under user control. In the earliest systems users exerted direct, low-level control, indicating the exact transformation to be applied to a data item manually at the time it was to be performed—in much the same manner as one now controls a small electronic calculator. With the passage of time, this user control medium has become much more sophisticated, culminating in the development of contemporary “high-level” user-oriented programming languages. The hardware used to implement these systems, however, has not yet reached correspondingly high levels of abstraction.