ECL

ECL may refer to:

In programming languages:

In other uses:

ECL (data-centric programming language)

ECL is a declarative, data centric programming language designed in 2000 to allow a team of programmers to process big data across a high performance computing cluster without the programmer being involved in many of the lower level, imperative decisions.

History

ECL was initially designed and developed in 2000 by David Bayliss as an in-house productivity tool within Seisint Inc and was considered to be a ‘secret weapon’ that allowed Seisint to gain market share in its data business. Equifax had an SQL-based process for predicting who would go bankrupt in the next 30 days, but it took 26 days to run the data. The first ECL implementation solved the same problem in 6 minutes. The technology was cited as a driving force behind the acquisition of Seisint by LexisNexis and then again as a major source of synergies when LexisNexis acquired ChoicePoint Inc.

Language constructs

ECL, at least in its purest form, is a declarative, data centric language. Programs, in the strictest sense, do not exist. Rather an ECL application will specify a number of core datasets (or data values) and then the operations which are to be performed on those values.

ECL programming language

The ECL programming language and system were an extensible high-level programming language and development environment developed at Harvard University in the 1970s. The name 'ECL' stood for 'Extensible Computer Language' or 'EClectic Language'. Some publications used the name 'ECL' for the entire system and 'EL/1' (Extensible Language) for the language itself.

ECL was an interactive system where programs were represented within the system; there was a compatible compiler and interpreter. It had an ALGOL-like syntax and an extensible data type system, with data types as first-class citizens. Data objects were values, not references, and the calling conventions gave a choice between call by value and call by reference for each argument.

ECL was primarily used for research and teaching in programming language design, programming methodology (in particular programming by transformational refinement), and programming environments at Harvard, though it was said to be used at some government agencies as well. It was first implemented on the PDP-10, with a later (interpreted-only) implementation on the PDP-11 written in BLISS-11 and cross-compiled on the PDP-10.