Category:FOCAL: Difference between revisions

FOCAL, which is allegedly short for "Formulating On-line Calculations in Algebraic Language", is an imperative, interpreted programming language similar to JOSS. It was first introduced in 1968, and FOCAL-69 was widely used on the PDP-8 minicomputer from Digital Equipment Corporation. Like JOSS and BASIC, FOCAL was not intended to be used for developing large applications; the manual said it was "designed to help scientists, engineers, and students solve numerical problems." The design goals thus emphasize simplicity and accessibility. It could also be used satisfactorily on quite small computers: the FOCAL interpreter would run on a PDP-8 with only 4k words (6k bytes) of storage and still leave some space for user programs.

There is a 256-line PDP-8 emulator in C which can run the included FOCAL binary tape image. Note that programs will run much faster than on a real PDP-8.

Exit the emulator by pressing Ctrl-Backslash. The emulator will quit and dump the zero page of memory in octal.