Application generators: Ideas for programming language extensions

Abstract

The continued development of higher order programming languages has not yielded major productivity improvements in the software development process. One often mentioned mechanism for achieving significant orders of improvement are application generators, such as RAMIS, NOMAD, and FOCUS. These systems have been applied to data intensive business applications with phenomenal success. The purpose of this paper is to present the basic components of application generators and show why they yield such large productivity increases in the EDP environment. We investigate the meaning of nonprocedural programming and show how it exists in current application generators. Then we analyze the possibility of extending application generators so that they may be used for non-edp type applications.