Nord Programming Language

Nord Programming Language (NPL), is a procedural programming language by the Norwegian minicomputer manufacturer Norsk Data. It shipped as a standard component of the operating system Sintran III.

The language was also used to implement Sintran III: the core and file system of which are written in NPL, as was the NPL compiler, and some core applications early on, until the release of high-level programming language named PLANC. Then, the linker and other software were rewritten in PLANC.

The NPL compiler was also special in that it did not emit object code as most compilers do. Instead it emitted an intermediate representation, in the form of assembly language code, which then had to be assembled using the Norsk Data Assembler.

The registers of the CPU were available in NPL as predefined variables. Thus could be written:

X + T =: A

and the compiler would emit:

COPY SX DA RADD ST DA

Functions could be declared with multiple entry points:

FUNC FUN1, FUN2 FUN1: T := 1 FUN2: code here END

could be called to set  to   before falling into   or   could be set to something else and call. If  register specified which file handle to write to, then either   could be called to always output to terminal or   could be specified to handle a file in   and call   to output to that file.