Met English

Met English was an early computer language used by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.

The original compiler was developed in 1957 and was called the English Language Compiler . It run on UNIVAC machines, but Metropolitan soon standardized on Honeywell equipment, and ported the compiler to the new hardware, renaming it the Metropolitan Honeywell Compiler .

On this configuration, Met English was used to write some of the most complex business systems of the 1960s. It remained the primary language used by Metropolitan in the 1970s, but began to get phased out after the company standardized on IBM hardware and software in the mid-1980s. Met English systems continued to run in the company (on a Honeywell emulator running on IBM System/370 mainframes) well into the 1990s.

It was a Fortran-like language. Some of its most peculiar characteristics included bytes and fields of variable bitness (length in bits), and use of self-modifying code (conditional branches were implemented by modifying the target address of branch instructions in memory). The language was very rich in mathematical functions, especially those useful to the insurance industry.