A programming language

By Kenneth E. Iverson. 1899

The paper describes a succinct problem-oriented programming language. The language is broad in scope, having been developed for, and applied effectively in, such diverse areas as microprogramming, switching theory, operations research, information retrieval, sorting theory, structure of compilers, search procedures, and language translation. The language permits a high degree of useful formalism. It relies heavily on a systematic extension of a small set of basic operations to vectors, matrices, and trees, and on a family of flexible selection operations controlled by logical vectors. Illustrations are drawn from a variety of applications.

Subfields: Program Analysis & Verification

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Citations in the corpus

Array programming with NumPy (2020, methodology): “The design of this new tool was informed by other powerful interactive programming languages for scientiﬁc computing such as Basis [47], Yorick [48], R [49], and APL [50], as well as commercial languages and environments like IDL and MATLAB.”
Two notes on notation (1992, background): “f writing δ, τ, or χ, when you recognize that the notation is quite unambiguous without an additional symbol. Then you will have arrived at the philosophical position adopted by Iverson when he wrote [21]. And I had also reached that stage when I completed the ﬁrst edition of [15]; I adopted Iverson”
The tensor algebra compiler (2017, background): “Dense Linear and Tensor Algebra There has been a lot of work on languages [13, 22, 28], libraries [2, 5, 20, 36, 43, 48], and compilers [31, 39] for dense linear algebra and loop transformations that can optimize dense loop nests [29, 49, 50].”