Work Flow Language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 17:34, 26 May 2005

Revision as of 20:26, 10 July 2005

Line 1:

'''Work Flow Language''', or '''WFL''' (pronounced wooflewiffle) was developed for the [[B5000]] line of computers and its operating system [[Master Control Program]]. It is still used as the operations language on the [[Unisys]] [[ClearPath/MCP]] range of machines. Developed soon after the B5000, WFL is the ClearPath equivalent of [[JCL]] on other machines and the shell scripts of Unix-style operating systems. Unlike JCL and shell scripts though, WFL is a high-level structured language complete with routines (procedures and functions) with arguments and high-level program control flow instructions. WFL programs are compiled so that they don't fail on statements during the run of a WFL job.

WFL is used for high-level system operations, such as running tasks, moving and copying files, providing high-level recoverability. Thus it is not a general purpose language in that you would not use it to do general computations. You can open and close files to check their attributes for example; however, you cannot read or change their contents in WFL – that you do in a general purpose language, and invoke it as a task from WFL.