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The Computer Journal 1976 19(1):25-31; doi:10.1093/comjnl/19.1.25
© 1976 by British Computer Society
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ALEC—A user extensible scientific programming language

R. B. E. Napper1 and R. N. Fisher2 *

1 Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK, 2 Department of Computational Science, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife, UK

This paper describes the user-extensible high-level scientific programming language, ALEC, the initial proposals for which were first given in 1967. The more interesting properties of the language, in particular the extension mechanism, are illustrated in some detail. Extensibility is achieved by using ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ macros. A macro definition causes an extension to the compiler itself and thus macro calls are implemented in the same way as the base language instructions. This alleviates the need to preprocess the source text, gives considerable flexibility and power to the language and enables efficient object code to be produced.

Received May 1974.

* Department of Computational Science, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland.

§ Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL


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