Work Flow Language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 11:28, 1 February 2005

Revision as of 17:34, 26 May 2005

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'''Work Flow Language''', or '''WFL''' (pronounced woofle) 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 cannotcan open and close files to check their attributes for example; however, you cannot read or change thetheir contents of files in WFL – that you do in a general purpose language, and invoke it as a task from WFL.

WFL has a high-level ALGOL-like readable syntax. It has none of the cryptic low-level assembler-like commands of JCL like //SYSIN DD, etc in order to connect hardware devices and open files for programs. All WFL constructs deal with the high-level abstractions of tasks and files. Parameters are also real HLL parameters, not the $1, $2... style position parameters of shell scripts.