Some time ago I started a series of postings about the programming-languages I worked with. For some reason I never continued that. Well, time to change that.
I worked about 9 years in a language called DataBus. This language still exists, but is called these days PL/B (Programming Language for Business). It was developed by the company Datapoint Inc to use on their mini-computers.
As said, Databus was originally developed for mini-computers, but later on version for many other environments were created as DOS, Windows, Unix/Linux, AS400 and so on.
DataBus is what they call a semi-compiler language. This means that the source-code is optimized and converted to a binary format. But a second program, called an Interpreter, is needed to execute the application. The Interpreter will “translate” the optimized code to machine instruction which a computer can understand and do something with.
DataBus used to be very popular in the automation of hospitals. It was very good for administrative applications and that was where it was designed for.
Personally I saw the syntax of DataBus always a weird mixture of Pascal, Cobol and C. I was very amazed to hear hat Databus (or rather PL/B) is still used by big companies as Boeing and Holiday-Inn.
Below an example of Databus:
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. SIMPLE READ SEQUENTIAL INTO A LIST
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CustRecord LIST
theCustomerNo DIM 5
theCustomerName DIM 40
theCustomerAmount FORM 9.9
LISTEND
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odbcOPEN “MyDSN”,”DEFAULTUSER”,”PASSWORD”
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odbcREAD 1,”* from CustomerTable”
LOOP
odbcREADKS 1,CustRecord
WHILE NOT OVER
DISPLAY theCustomerNo,” “,theCustomerName,” “,theCustomerAmount
REPEAT
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odbcCLOSE
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