SCALP(ID:3299/sca006)

Dartmouth small Algol system 

for Self-Contained ALgol Processor

Replacement for ALGOL 30 at Darthmouth 1962 Kurz, Garland and Knapp

"The design of SCALP [...] was limited by having only one-third of the available 4K word memory for the compiler, another third for the run-time support routines (including software floating point routines), and the final third for the compiled user code. Several drastic decisions were made, the most severe of which was to limit thefor-loop construct to only the while element, since one could obtain the step-until element as a special case.

Two other details of SCALP are worth mentioning. The student's program was compiled almost as fast as the source code paper tape could be read in. Furthermore, once in execution, a program could be traced and patched using the symbols of the source code. These two features allowed five or six student jobs to be completed in 15 minutes. Thus, quick turnaround and the ability to deal only with the source language were confirmed as essential for a student-oriented system. Hundreds of students over the next several years learned and used SCALP until it was replaced by BASIC (Kurtz, 1963a, Jan.)."
Related languages
ALGOL 30 => SCALP   Evolution of
References:
  • Kurz, T.E. "BASIC" view details
          in SIGPLAN Notices 14(04) April 1979 including The first ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages (HOPL) Los Angeles, CA, June 1-3, 1978 view details