Writing man-machine dialogues for a MUMPS system using the Application Controller Language (ACL).

Abstract

The Application Controller Language (ACL) was designed to facilitate the development of man-machine dialogues. An exact specification of such a dialogue before programming begins is unlikely to be implemented without many changes. Immediately a dialogue is used, the 'hands-on' experience suggests many improvements. ACL was designed to serve as a flexible tool to enable easy re-shaping of this dialogue. For this reason, ACL is structured, allows documentary comments, and may be easily edited. ACL complements MUMPS and encourages the writing of small modular MUMPS programs to carry out well-defined tasks. For this purpose, ACL serves as the 'top' of a top-down written structure, with calls to MUMPS programs being made from ACL statements. A smooth dialogue is made easier to achieve by having all ACL statements use a single I/O processor giving a uniform terminal behaviour and appearance to the display. The programmer is encouraged to call this same I/O processor from his MUMPS application programs. ACL was used extensively for the development of a data management systems for hospital critical care.