The Address Programming Language, developed by Kateryna Yushchenko in 1955 in the Soviet Union, was one of the first high-level programming languages. It introduced the concept of indirect addressing and pointers, fundamental concepts that influenced later languages.
Historical Context
Developed at the Kiev Institute of Mathematics, the Address Language was created independently of Western high-level languages like FORTRAN. It ran on the MESM and BESM computers, early Soviet electronic computers.
Key Innovation: Indirect Addressing
The Address Language introduced pointers and indirect addressing—the ability to store addresses as data and access memory through those addresses. This concept became fundamental to:
- Data structures (linked lists, trees)
- Dynamic memory allocation
- System programming
- Later languages (C, Pascal)
Features
The language included:
- Symbolic notation for operations
- Variable addresses (pointers)
- Indirect memory access
- Subroutine support
Significance
The Address Language demonstrated that:
- High-level programming concepts emerged independently in different countries
- Pointers/indirect addressing are fundamental programming concepts
- Soviet computer science made significant parallel contributions
Legacy
Though less well-known in the West, the Address Language pioneered concepts that became essential to systems programming. Its introduction of indirect addressing predated similar concepts in Western languages.