NELIAC was never intended to be a commercial product. Its primary advantage over other compilers of the day was its portability to other computers, and its one-pass compiler architecture which made possible such fast compile times that it compiled 60 to 120 times faster than other high-level programming languages which used multi-pass compilers. The JOVIAL compiler made 14 passes, for example. The simplicity of the language and its rapid compile times permitted much faster development cycles than other contemporaneous compilers. It was an in-house NEL effort to make possible a more cost-effective solution to the problem of computer system development.