Autocode

Autocode is the name of a family of "simplified coding systems", later called programming languages, devised in the 1950s and 1960s for a series of digital computers at the Universities of Manchester, Cambridge and London.

Today the term is used to refer to the family of early languages descended from the Manchester Mark 1 autocoder systems, which were generally similar.

The example omits necessary scaling instruction needed to place integers into variables and assumes that results of multiplication fit into lower accumulator.

It wasn't even mentioned in Brooker's 1958 paper called "The Autocode Programs developed for the Manchester University Computers".

[5] An example code which loads array of size 11 of floating-point numbers from the input would look like this Brooker's Autocode removed two main difficulties of Mark 1's programmer: scaling and management of two-level storage.

Mercury Autocode had a limited repertoire of variables a-z and a'-z' and, in some ways resembled early versions of the later Dartmouth BASIC language.

In order to overcome the relatively small store size available on Mercury, large programs were written as distinct "chapters", each of which constituted an overlay.