MOBL(ID:5636/mob001)Macro Oriented Business Languagefor Macro Oriented Business Language High level information retrieval language, translates into MICA and thence into SCAT Owen Moor, Integrated Data Division, North American Aviation Company, 1960 Hardware:
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References: Because of the enormous effort required to prepare translator for each eomptlting machine involved, meat on language should precede the construction compilers. Looking over the approximately 100 programs that have been written in this area, one sees little in mon and much variance. This suggests that if those volved in the programming of information retrieval lems were to attempt to specify a eommon standard language paralleling ALGOL and COBOL, agreement be quite dittieult. Thus, considering the present state the art of writing compilers it is unlikely that agreement on a special information retrieval language is imminent. An alternative is the use of an existing language expressing the information retrieval program. There been successful uses of algebraic languages in this and, presumably, even more successful uses of eommereial data processing languages. Still another approach use of a multilevel hierarchical language system allows one to construct new statements especially designed for the task. The authors report on their experience in using which is such a system. MOBL is the name given set of macro instructions especially designed for the manip- ulations of data processing. This paper shows how MOBL was extended to meet the needs of retrieval programming. MOBL (Macro Oriented Business Language) is designed for use with MICA (Macro Instructian Compiler Assebler), a preprocessor for tile SOS system for the IBM 7090 MICA, developed and implemented by the North American Aviation Company under the guidance of Owen Moore accepts a MOBL program written largely or entirely in the form of macro instructions and converts it to a sequence of one-for-one symbolic machine instructions, then proceeds directly to assemble these and produce 7090 machine language programs. DOI Extract: Description Description of the MOBL-MICA System MICA is an hierarchically organized compiler with a dominant system macro at the highest level. One level below the system macro lies the users program written in the form of one macro. This may contain machine coding library macros and user's macros. By sublevel nesting of macros, the user can eliminate redundant effort in the construction of new macros. If an address field is not defined in the macro which references it, the next higher level macro is examined and then the next, until the symbol is found. If the symbol is defined in more than one skeleton, MICA will alter the symbol (and all references to it) at each occurence to provide uniquely defined symbols. Operation codes (macros or machine coding), as well as location symbols, may appear as parameters; This allows MICA to compile alternate operations, depending on the decisions made at compiling time usually based on pr definitions. Fields may be defined without concern for word boundaries and may be either alphanumeric or binary. Once specified, the user may reference these fields with little concern for their description. For example, when using the MOVE macro, the user need only provide the symbolic locations (indexable) of the "from" arid "to" fields. The compiler will be responsible for such things as shifting, changing modes, masking and making the necessary adjustments when the fields are unequal in length. The following types of macros are provided by the MOBL library: - Input-Output - Data Definitions - Field Test and Control - Arithmetic - Logic Control - Field Editing - Indexing - Debugging Extract: Technique Technique of Writing With MOBL To write a retrieval program in MOBL, one prepares the data description which defines files, records and fields. One then proceeds to write the procedure using, for the most part, the macros provided by the MOBL language which address the files, records and fields previously defined. These describe the required manipulations. A significant feature of an hierarchical macro system like MICA is that it allows simple extensions of the language by creating new procedures (user macros ) to embody repeated actions. in [ACM] CACM 4(09) (September 1961) view details MOBL is the name given to the set of macro instructions especially designed for the manipulations of data processing. MOBL is designed for use with MICA (Macro Instruction Compiler Assembler), a preprocessor for the SOS system for the IBM 7090. MICA accepts a MOBL, program written largely or entirely in the form of macro instructions and converts it to a sequence of one-for-one symbolic machine instructions, then proeeeds directly to assemble these and produce 7090 machine language programs, in [ACM] CACM 5(01) January 1962 "Design, Implementation and Application of IR-Oriented Languages," ACM Computer Language Committee on Information Retrieval on 20-21 October 1961 in Princeton, N. J. view details |