SURVEY OF COMPUTER LANGUAGES FOR SYMBOLIC AND ALGEBRAIC MANIPULATIONS.

This report is a preprint of a paper summarizing a study conducted by the Comparison of Languages Subcommittee of the ACM Special Interest Committee on Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation SICSAM on 18 computer languages for symbolic and algebraic manipulation that met certain criteria of relevance and availability ALTRAN, AMBIT, COGENT, COMIT, CONVERT, CORAL, DYSTAL, FLIP, FORMAC, FORMULA ALGOL, IPL-V, LISP1.5, LISP2, L6, PANON, SLIP, SNOBOL, and TRAC. Several other languages are also briefly discussed. For each of six groups into which the languages are classified, the paper a describes properties that members of the group have in common, b gives a brief description of each language in the group, including an excerpt from a program in the language that demonstrates the kind of problem for which the language is well suited and c briefly compares the features of the languages in the group. The paper contains three appendices 1 a reference chart that summarizes the features of all of the languages 2 a comparison chart that emphasizes the salient distinctions between selected pairs of similar languages and 3 a set of annotated examples of programs in various languages that solve similar problems, thus illustrating the differences in data representations, program forms, and notations. The paper is a cooperative effort of a board of consultants, including experts in each of the languages, who contributed data and reviewed the draft.