Transaction Application Language or TAL (originally "Tandem Application Language") is a block-structured, procedural language optimized for use on

Tandem Tandem, or in tandem, is an arrangement in which two or more animals, machines, or people are lined up one behind another, all facing in the same direction. ''Tandem'' can also be used more generally to refer to any group of persons or objects w ...

(and later HP NonStop) hardware. TAL resembles a cross between C and Pascal. It was the original

system programming language A system programming language is a programming language used for system programming; such languages are designed for writing system software, which usually requires different development approaches when compared with application software. Eds ...

for the Tandem Computers CISC machines, which had no assembler. The design concept of TAL, an evolution of

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

's SPL, was intimately associated and optimized with a microprogrammed CISC instruction set. Each TAL statement could easily compile into a sequence of instructions that manipulated data on a transient floating register stack. The register stack itself floated at the crest of the program's memory allocation and call stack. The language itself has the appearance of

ALGOL ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ...

or Pascal, with BEGIN and END statements. However, its semantics are far more like C. It does not permit indefinite levels of procedure nesting, it does not pass complex structured arguments by value, and it does not strictly type most variable references. Programming techniques are much like C using pointers to structures, occasional overlays, deliberate string handling and casts when appropriate. Available datatypes include 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and (introduced later) 64-bit integers. Microcode level support was available for null terminated character strings. However, this is not commonly used. Originally the Tandem NonStop operating system was written in TAL. Much of it has since been rewritten in C and TAL has been deprecated for new development. In the migration from CISC to RISC, TAL was updated/replaced with pTAL – compilers allowed TAL to be re-compiled into Native RISC Applications. Later, the epTAL compiler was introduced for Itanium processors.

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