Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program

It was developed by Stan Poley at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

[1] Donald Knuth independently produced versions named SOAP III in 1958[5] and SUPERSOAP in 1959[6] at Case Institute of Technology, now part of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

The US National Bureau of Standards, under the direction of Herbert Howe, also wrote a version of SOAP, called ISOPAR, said to significantly improve optimization.

This optimization was said to make the assembled programs "run as much as six or seven times faster.

"[1] SOAP II supports the following pseudo-operations (assembly directives):[2] Each source card can contain up to ten characters of comments in columns 63–72.