A critique of algebraic programming languages

ABSTRACT

The newly emerging area of computation of algebraic structures has forcibly illustrated serious shortcomings in existing higher-level languages. If an algebraic structure program is written in a high level language it is so inefficient in its utilization of store as to be of little practical use. If, on the other hand, such a program is written in assembly language, although now it has considerable practical application, the cost of developing it is high and the program cannot be run on a different type of machine without recoding.