APT (programming language)

APT, short for Automatically Programmed Tool, is a high-level programming language used mainly to generate instructions for numerically controlled machine tools. It was created and refined in the late 1950s and early 1960s at the Servomechanisms Laboratory at MIT, where Douglas T. Ross led the technical effort and is considered by many to be the father of APT. The language spared machinists and engineers the tedious geometry of working out the points a cutting tool must pass through to shape the complex parts the aerospace industry needed. A programmer writes text statements describing geometry and toolpaths, and an APT processor produces a cutter location file that a machine-specific post-processor turns into instructions for the control, most commonly G-code. APT was sponsored by the US Air Force and is notable as the first major cooperative programming venture, joining government agencies, universities and a fourteen-company team. It was an early ANSI standard, and derivatives include ADAPT, EXAPT and UNIAPT, plus the robotics languages RAPT and ROBEX.