Work Flow Language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 10:56, 22 December 2007

Revision as of 13:55, 19 March 2008

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'''Work Flow Language''', or '''WFL''' (pronounced wiffle) is the operations language for the [[Burroughs large systems]], including the [[Unisys]] [[ClearPath/MCP]] series, and their operating system [[MCP (Burroughs Large Systems)|Master Control Program]]. Developed soon after the B5000 in 1961, WFL is the ClearPath equivalent of [[Job Control Language|JCL]] on other machines and the [[shell script]]s 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.