14 Facts About JOSS

JOSS was one of the first interactive, time-sharing programming languages.

JOSS was initially implemented on the JOHNNIAC machine at RAND Corporation and put online in 1963.

JOSS was implemented almost entirely by J Clifford Shaw, a mathematician who worked in Rand's growing computing division.

JOSS system was brought up formally for the first time in May 1963, supporting five consoles, one in the machine room and another four in offices around the building.

JOSS introduced the idea of a single command line editor that worked both as an interactive language and a program editor.

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In contrast to most BASICs, JOSS saved the entire user input to files, not just the program code.

JOSS uses a suffix notation to indicate conditional evaluation, "do this if this is true", in contrast to most languages which place the condition in front in prefix notation, "if this is true, do this".

JOSS expanded on this concept by clearly defining the concept of the "proposition", an expression that returns a logical value, true or false, instead of a numeric one.

JOSS' version has any number of conditionals, not just three, so it is more of a compact switch statement than a compact if-then.

JOSS used a somewhat obscure format to define the limits of the loop.

That is because in JOSS, ranges are first-class citizens of the language, not something that is part of a loop as in BASIC.

JOSS maintains a pointer to the currently executing line, which a Do would change.

JOSS defined a number of functions that performed looping internally, in order to avoid the programmer having to write a For loop to perform simple tasks like summing a series of numbers.

JOSS system used a hard disk to store user programs in an allocated space.