“The FORTRAN Automatic Coding System” was presented at the Western Joint Computer Conference in 1957 and authored by John Backus together with the other members of the IBM team that built the system, including R. J. Beeber, S. Best, R. Goldberg, L. M. Haibt, H. L. Herrick, R. A. Nelson, D. Sayre, P. B. Sheridan, H. Stern, I. Ziller, R. A. Hughes, and R. Nutt.
The paper describes FORTRAN as a system for the IBM 704 that translates programs written in a language close to ordinary algebraic notation into efficient machine-language programs. It sets out the main features of the language and explains the structure of the compiler that performs the translation.
A large part of the paper is devoted to the work the compiler does to make its output run fast. The authors describe how the system analyzes a program’s arithmetic, its index calculations, and its loop and branch structure in order to generate machine code that competes with code written by hand. This emphasis on optimization was central to convincing skeptical programmers that a high-level language could be practical.
The paper is a primary record of the first widely used high-level language at the moment of its release, written by the people who built it, and it is one of the foundational documents in the history of compilers.