Progress Report on Language H
A H Beaven · ITNOW · 1964
In April 1962 an account of some early operating experience with Language H was given at the BCS Conference on Automatic Programming Languages. (Ref. BCS Journal, Vol. 5, No. 3.) The following notes provide a brief description of Language H and an account of further operating experience since the BCS Conference. Language H has been designed to avoid the complications of data and environment divisions and, as a result, a source program consists of a brief heading and a set of statements which form the procedure division. These statements may be grouped into segments, called chapters, for processing convenience. The program statements are all executive in character, i.e. of the form “Do something” and are independent of the type of computer on which the object program will ultimately run. The first word in a source program statement is always an imperative verb and subsequent words are either operand names or “noise” words, the latter being inserted to increase the intelligibility of the statement.