X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Coral 66


Coral 66

Source code for a Coral 66 compiler (written in BCPL) has been recovered and the "Official Definition of Coral 66" document by HMSO has been scanned; the Ministry of Defence patent office has issued a licence to the Edinburgh Computer History project to allow them to put both the code and the language reference online for non-commercial use.

CORAL (Computer On-line Real-time Applications Language) is a programming language originally developed in 1964 at the Royal Radar Establishment (RRE), Malvern, UK, as a subset of JOVIAL.

A variant of Coral 66 was developed during the late 1970s/early 1980s by the British GPO, in conjunction with GEC, STC and Plessey, for use on the System X digital telephone exchange control computers, known as PO-CORAL.

Fixed-point arithmetic

JOVIAL and Coral 66 also provide both floating- and fixed-point types.


Philip Woodward

In the 1960s Philip Woodward's computer software team in Malvern provided the Royal Radar Establishment with the ALGOL 68R compiler, the world's first implementation of the programming language ALGOL 68, and provided the armed services with their first standard high-level programming language, Coral 66, for the small military computers of the day.


see also