PS-algol
PS-algol is an orthogonally persistent programming language.
PS-algol was an extension of the language S-algol implemented by the Universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh, Scotland. S-algol was designed by Ron Morrison, and extended and by Pete Bailey, Fred Brown, Paul Cockshott, Ken Chisholm and Al Dearle.
PS-algol was the world's first fully implemented persistent programming language, and had a significant quantity of users both in academia and, notably, in ICL research labs.
History
PS-algol was conceived by chance, when Ron Morrison was on sabbatical at Edinburgh University and met Malcolm Atkinson. Atkinson had been experimenting with persistent programming languages and was struggling to find a coherent model for a persistent Pascal variant. Morrison, whose interest in general-purpose programming had led to the development of S-algol, a general purpose teaching language, realised that S-algol's type system would more easily allow the addition of orthogonal persistence.
Further reading
- Atkinson, MP; Bailey, PJ; Chisholm, KJ; Cockshott, WP; Morrison, R. (1983), "PS-algol: A Language for Persistent Programming", Proc. 10th Australian National Computer Conference, Melbourne, Australia (pdf), pp. 70–79