>Yeah, they evolved, perhaps too far, but essentially it was a simple procedural tool.
Wrong way round. PROC began life with the ancestor of MultiValue - the GIRLS system. SMI wrote a Language Extender (SMILE for GIRLS) that was a buffer driven minimal reverse polish language that could handle both screen and file I/O. This was the first 'programming' language for the model, before BASIC was added later. This then diverged into two branches: one stayed with SMI and became RPL, a very fast but (IMHO) horrible language that was a compiled version of PROC: still buffer driven and reduced instruction set. The other became PROC which in turn was implemented in two ways by the different vendors: the simple set used for batch control (PQ) was implemented on most PICK platforms and is really functionally equivalent to Paragraph, though with more terminal control and the ability to stack to and from BASIC - important when the calling stack for BASIC subroutines on the old PICK systems was very limited; and the PQN format originally taken by Microdata that retained the file handling from SMI's languages. Personally I would never use them willingly today, but they had their (important) place in history. Brian Leach ________________________________________________________________________ This email was checked on leaving Microgen for viruses, similar malicious code and inappropriate content by MessageLabs SkyScan. DISCLAIMER This email and any attachments are confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the named recipient, please notify the sender immediately and do not disclose the contents to any other person, use it for any purpose, or store or copy the information. In the event of any technical difficulty with this email, please contact the sender or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Microgen Information Management Solutions http://www.microgen.co.uk -- u2-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.oliver.com/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
