Environment for Problem-Oriented Languages

Current interest and activity in linking the engineer and the computer into an effective design team are considerable. The necessity that the engineer have close, personal contact with the computer has led to the development of problem-oriented languages (POLs) such as COGO and STRESS. These languages let the engineer describe his problem in a vocabulary he would use to describe it to a professional colleague. Despite the advantages of the languages themselves, the processors for these languages leave much to be desired. The languages cannot be easily modified, and new processors for different machines must be written by hand. Both disadvantages can be eliminated if a POL is defined in its entirety before programming of the processor begins, and the processor is programmed in a procedural, essentially machine-independent, language. The paper describes a system for the POLs of the COGO and STRESS type. The emphasis is on providing a system for the development and modification of POLs by users themselves, to be applicable to whatever computers are available.