ASTROL—An associative structure-oriented language

Abstract

The language ASTROL resulted from the search for a "small" language somewhat like LISP 1.5 which could be easily implemented on a minicomputer with about 32K bytes of store. The LISP cell was considered to be an example of the record—an object whose structure is specified by a set of field descriptors. However, the set of descriptors is often allocated at compile time, whereas it would be useful to be able to add descriptors to a record dynamically.