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An interpreted programming language resembling JOSS. Stands for "Formula Calculator."
Largely the creation of Richard Merrill, FOCAL was initially written for and had its largest impact on the DEC's PDP-8 computers. Merrill wrote the original (1968) and classic
FOCAL-69 interpreters for the PDP-8. Digital itself described FOCAL as "a JOSS-like language."
Like early versions of BASIC, FOCAL was a complete programming environment in itself, requiring no operating system. As in MUMPS, most commands could be, and in practice were, abbreviated to a single letter of the alphabet. Creative choices of words were used to make each command uniquely defined by its leading character. Digital made available several European-language versions in which the command words were translated into the target language.
FOCAL ran on very low-end PDP-8 systems, even systems lacking mass storage. Multiuser FOCAL systems, running on quite small systems, could drive up to four teletypes and serve four users simultaneously.
Comparisons between FOCAL and BASIC are inevitable. FOCAL lacked support for strings as data elements that could be assigned to variables, a major deficiency vis-a-vis BASIC. This deficiency, while serious, was not as utterly crippling as my sound. A surprising amount of string usage in programs is devoted to formatting user output. Since FOCAL output was character-stream-oriented, outputting two strings sequentially could sometime substitute for concatenating them, and procedural tools written for performing complex formatted output.
It is generally agreed that FOCAL was more efficient in its use of resources than comparable BASIC systems, and on the machines of the day, often with core memory (RAM) in the 6 to 24-kilobyte range, on comparable systems FOCAL could handle large and more difficult programming tasks than BASIC.
FOCAL's traditional PDP-8 implementation used a floating point representation that represented numbers as four 12-bit words, with thirty-six bits of mantissa and twelve bits of exponent. This allowed for both significantly higher precision and a significantly wider range of values than other low-end programming systems, and made it reasonably suitable for numerical work. The high precision, and good choices for default decimal output formatting, meant that issues with binary-to-decimal rounding were not evident to beginning users.
The Coca-Cola Corporation used a customized version of FOCAL called COKE.
FOCAL was later implemented on the PDP-7/9 and PDP-11.
One cause of FOCAL's decline may have been intellectual-property issues; FOCAL's IP heritage was sufficiently cloudy that Digital could not be certain who "owned" it, and this was probably a factor leading to Digital de-emphasizing it and failing to continue development of the language.
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