UNCOL

UNCOL (Universal Computer Oriented Language) is a universal intermediate language for compilers. The idea was introduced in 1958, by a SHARE ad-hoc committee. It was never fully specified or implemented; in many ways it was more a concept than a language.

UNCOL was intended to make compilers economically available for each new instruction set architecture and programming language, thereby reducing an N×M problem to N+M. Each machine architecture would require just one compiler back end, and each programming language would require one compiler front end. This was a very ambitious goal because compiler technology was in its infancy, and little was standardized in computer hardware and software.