MAD (programming language)

Developed in 1959 at the University of Michigan by Bernard Galler, Bruce Arden and Robert M. Graham, MAD is a variant of the ALGOL language.

[2] The archives at the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan contain reference materials on the development of MAD and MAD/I, including three linear feet of printouts with hand-written notations and original printed manuals.

[18] The following is an interesting quote from An Interview with Brian Kernighan[19] when he was asked "What hooked you on programming?

MADTRAN was simply a translator from FORTRAN to MAD, which then produced machine code.

[13] MAD/I has a syntactic structure similar to ALGOL 60 together with important features from the original MAD and from PL/I.

It was available for use under MTS and provided many new ideas which made their way into other languages, but MAD/I compilations were slow and MAD/I never extended itself into widespread use when compared to the original 7090 MAD.

[12] GOM is essentially the 7090 MAD language modified and extended for the 360/370 architecture with some judicious tailoring to better fit current programming practices and problems.

Few keywords in the language are reserved words since most are longer than six letters or are surrounded by periods.

Five basic modes are supported: The mode of a constant can be redefined by adding the character M followed by a single digit at the end of the constant, where 0 indicates floating point, 1 integer, 2 boolean, 3 function name, and 4 statement label.

where: Three pre-defined packages of definitions (MATRIX, DOUBLE PRECISION, and COMPLEX) are available for inclusion in MAD source programs using the INCLUDE statement.