Napier88

Napier88 was a special kind of programming language created at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. The main person behind it was Ron Morrison, and others like Fred Brown, Richard Connor, and Al Dearle helped to build it. This language was very advanced for its time because it was the first to mix a flexible system for types of data with a way to keep information forever, even after turning off the computer.

Many people, up to 1,000, started using Napier88 in schools and companies. But it was made mostly to show that this kind of programming could work, and after 1989 when it was first released, the people who made it moved on to other projects and stopped updating it.

Even though Napier88 is no longer used, it helped shape other technologies. For example, a type called ANY in CORBA looks a lot like one in Napier88. Also, systems like Microsoft's Common Language Runtime and Java use ideas that came from Napier88 to solve tricky problems in programming.

History

Napier88 was the third in a series of computer languages created by Morrison at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. It came after two earlier languages called S-algol and PS-algol.