Babbage (programming language)

For other uses, see Babbage (disambiguation).

Babbage

Paradigm	procedural, structured, High-level assembler
First appeared	around 1971 (1971)
Stable release	308
OS	COS, GEC DOS, OS4000
Influenced
BCPL

Babbage is the high level assembly language for the GEC 4000 series minicomputers. It was named after Charles Babbage, an English computing pioneer.

Example

PROCESS CHAPTER FACTORIAL

ENTRY LABEL ENTRYPOINT

LITERAL TO = 4                              // Assume using the default proforma

EXTERNAL ROUTINE
     OPEN,
     PUT,
     CLOSE,
     TOCHAR

VECTOR [0,19] OF BYTE ANSWER = "factorial x = xxxxxx"
 
HALF COUNT
HALF VALUE
FULL RESULT

//******************************************************************************

     ROUTINE FACT(VALUE)
     // return factorial of RA.

     VALUE => RESULT

     WHILE DECREMENT VALUE GT //0// DO
     <<
          RESULT * VALUE => RESULT
     >>
     RETURN(RESULT)
     END

//******************************************************************************

ENTRYPOINT:

     OPEN(TO, 1)

     // Print factorials for numbers 1 through 9
     1 => RA
     REPEAT
     <<
          RA => COUNT
          FACT(RA) => RA
          TOCHAR(RA, 7, ANSWER + 13)
          TOCHAR(COUNT, 2, ANSWER + 9)
          PUT(TO, 20, ANSWER)
          COUNT + 1 => RA
     >>
     WHILE RA LT 10

     CLOSE(TO)
     STOP(0)
     END

//******************************************************************************

See also

• GEC 4000 series
• OS4000