Annual Review in Automatic Programming, Volume 2 is a collection of papers that discusses the controversy about the suitability of COBOL as a common business oriented language, and the development of different common languages for scientific computation. A couple of papers describes the use of the Genie system in numerical calculation and analyzes Mercury autocode in terms of a phrase structure language, such as in the source language, target language, the order structure of ATLAS, and the meta-syntactical language of the assembly program. Other papers explain interference or an "intermediate return" using ALGOL, the National-Elliot 803 Computer, and the MADCAP II. MADCAP II is A version of the automatic programming compiler for MANIAC II. One paper discusses the APT which serves as a common computer language for computational problems. Another paper explains SAKO which can bypass machine language almost entirely in the field of numerical and logical problems, particularly in programs using XYZ and ZAM II. A report of the Working Committee of the British Computer Society Discussion Group No. 5 concludes that COBOL is unnecessarily complex due to its close machine orientation. Computer engineers, computer instructors, programmers, and students of computer science will find the collection highly valuable.
