ALTRAN (ALgebraic TRANslator) is a programming language for the formal manipulation of rational functions of several variables with integer coefficients.
[6] An early version of ALTRAN was developed by M. Douglas McIlroy and W. Stanley Brown in the middle 1960s.
[1] Later, Feldman and Julia Ho added a rational expression evaluation package that generated accurate and efficient FORTRAN subroutines for the numerical evaluation of symbolic expressions produced by ALTRAN.
[7] In 1979, ALTRAN was ported to the Control Data Corporation 6600 and Cyber 176 computers at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory.
It was also observed that ALTRAN was able to quickly solve problems which neither FORMAC nor REDUCE could handle on the given hardware or in reasonable time.