The Klerer–May System is a programming language developed in the mid-1960s, oriented to numerical scientific programming, whose most notable feature is its two-dimensional syntax based on traditional mathematical notation.
For input and output, the Klerer–May system used a
Friden Flexowriter modified to allow half-line motions for subscripts and superscripts.
[1] The character set included digits, upper-case letters, subsets of 14 lower-case Latin letters and 18 Greek letters, arithmetic operators (+
−
×
/
|
) and punctuation (.
,
(
)
), and eight special line-drawing characters (resembling ╲
╱
⎜
_
⎨
⎬
˘
⁔
) used to construct multi-line brackets and symbols for
summation,
products,
roots, and for multi-line
division or fractions.
[2]
The system was intended to be forgiving of input mistakes, and easy to learn; its reference manual was only two pages.
[3]
The system was developed by Melvin Klerer and Jack May at Columbia University's Hudson Laboratories in Dobbs Ferry, New York, for the Office of Naval Research, and ran on GE-200 series computers. [2]