An embeddable and extendable language for large-scale programming on the Internet

This article addresses the problem of programming by combining already existing programs on the INTERNET. For this, an interpreter based language called Progress is presented. Progress makes it possible to use and combine programs and functionalities provided by various servers in a simple and elegant way, similar to what a UNIX shell does for locally available programs. Moreover the inherent parallelism, which is given due to the fact that programs may reside on different hosts, can be fully exploited in Progress. Other important features of Progress are that the language can be extended by new data types and that it is embeddable in other software systems. This article presents the main concepts and ideas of Progress and gives an overview of the language.