Is this the problem in commercial applications programming

The purpose of this essay is to locate someone in the academic community who might be interested in a major commercial computer problem totally ignored at ACM conventions and into choose an example intended to be significant-the 25th anniversary issue of ACM Communications. Ninety percent of commercial applications programmers have this environment: The hardware, operating system and language exist. No one wants them touched. In a language like COBOL, PL/1 or Assembler, I must write an applications program. How do I proceed if I already know the language and the operating system? If anyone has been considering that problem, it has escaped my attention. Because the problems seem more challenging in hardware, operating systems and languages, the computer community represented at AFIPS meetings and in ACM literature explores those problems. As an illustration of what might be done, I sketch very briefly some possibilities we have been exploring. The computer job is the proper design unit for commercial applications programming. For a model of office work of wide relevance, a computer job can be presented with a structure invariant to the application. Excluding sorts, that invariant job has three steps. Each has five program parts. In some steps, some parts are empty. Four of the five parts do processing. The logic in them is application dependent, but their structure is invariant. It has these features: • The organization is modular and the module is rigorously defined. • The module is independent; given arguments always produce the same values. • The basis for dividing a program part into modules (including one module) is record-type. (The selection 14 of record types requires a value judgment.) The fifth program part accesses all the records and transfers program execution within itself and among the processing parts. Continuous processing and batch processing differ only in this part. For thP fifth part, the logic-at the level just above coding-is application independent and can be presented as a series of logic diagrams. All the data in all the reports in one system*-including all levels of totals, all page and column headings (unless they are preprinted) and all constants but excluding duplicates-are the Information Set. (I) • All the reports produced in one cycle (i.e.-for transactions over one period of time) are produced by one computer-job. That subset of I is 1,. • All the reports produced in one step of a job are a subset of 1,. …