A language design for vector machines

This paper deals with a programming language under development at NASA's Langley Research Center for the CDC STAR-100. The design goals for the language are that it be basic in design and able to be extended as deemed necessary to serve the user community, capable of the expression of efficient algorithms by forcing the user to make the maximum use of the specialized hardware design, and easy to implement so that the language and compiler could be developed with a minimum of effort. The key to the language was in choosing the basic data types and data structures. Scalars, vectors, and strings are available data types in the language. Each basic data type has an associated set of operators which consist primarily of the operations provided by the hardware. The only data structure in the language is a restricted form of the array. Only vector and string data types may be stored in arrays, forcing the user to vectorize scalar data when it is necessary to structure it. This permits the most effective use of the machine for entities such as real arrays since the high level vector machine instructions may be used to deal with them directly.