Goals and Principles
The three key principles in designing the language were reliability, efficiency, and machine-independence. The language is designed to allow aerospace-related tasks (such as vector/matrix arithmetic) to be accomplished in a way that is easily understandable by people who have spaceflight knowledge, but may not necessarily have proficiency with computer programming.
HAL/S was designed not to include some constructs that are thought to be the cause of errors. For instance, there is no support for dynamic memory allocation. The language provides special support for real-time execution environments.
Some features, such as "GOTO" were provided chiefly to ease mechanical translations from other languages.
On the Preface page of the HAL/S Language Specification, it says,
- fundamental contributions to the concept and implementation of MAC were made by Dr. J. Halcombe Laning of the Draper Laboratory.
"HAL" was suggested as the name of the new language by Ed Copps, a founding director of Intermetrics, to honor Hal Laning, a colleague at MIT.
A proposal for a NASA standard ground-based version of HAL named HAL/G for "ground" was proposed, but the coming emergence of the soon to be named Ada programming language contributed to Intermetrics' lack of interest in continuing this work. Instead, Intermetrics would place emphasis on what would be the "Red" finalist which would not be selected.
Read more about this topic: HAL/S
Famous quotes containing the words goals and, goals and/or principles:
“Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain’t-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on—our lost narcissism lives on—in our ego ideal.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)
“Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“...at this stage in the advancement of women the best policy for them is not to talk much about the abstract principles of women’s rights but to do good work in any job they get, better work if possible than their male colleagues.”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)