Programming Productivity Enhancement by the Use of Application Generators.
Abstract
This research was initiated in June 1982. The early work began with an investigation of commercially available application generators. This was undertaken because of a belief that such systems provide a major increase in programming productivity, at least for a narrow range of 'edp' applications. The plan called for investigating systems such as RAMIS, NOMAD and FOCUS with the goal of determining what features contributed to this improvement. The investigators were successful in that they isolated what they believe to be the major features that contribute to increased programming productivity, namely an application generator's built-in interface to a database management system, its non-procedural programming language constructs, and the high-level operators for specific operations. The main activity during the previous nine months has been to see if the investigators could design these features into a general purpose programming language. They decided to use Ada as the starting point. They needed to design an extension of Ada that permits the language to interface with a database management system. They concluded that this interface should not merely be a set of remote procedure calls, but a true extension of the language. This implied that they had to extend the type facility and provide new operators, while preserving the design principles of the language. This is the logical first step towards their goal of incorporating true application generator features into a conventional programming language. This report summarizes the work in this area during this period.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Nov 01, 1983
- Accession Number
- ADA137124
Entities
People
- E. Horowitz
Organizations
- University of Southern California