Third generation programming languages.

A small research project aimed at better optimization of the generated object code for Fortran programs. The prototype supports a subset of the Fortran syntax but reach improvements of more than 50 percent compared to a certain commercial compiler. The improvements gained were less in memory footprint but more in CPU cycles.

The resulting prototype is available as Free Software under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It can be found at the website of Fred Mobach under the name forass.cbl.gz. Comments are in Dutch only.

This prototype has once been used in cooperation with the system programmers at the Ministry of Justice to optimize a small part of a standard application written in the Fortran programming language. A software monitor written for this research project was used to select the subroutines where most CPU cycles were spent. It saved the Ministry an expensive upgrade of their Siemens BS2000 mainframe.

Fourth generation programming languages.

In cooperation with Du Prie DP Engineering BV during many years we've researched and developed in the area of fourth generation programming languages. The DP2 product is one of the results of this work.

Our goal was to research the development of an automated software system which could be used to develop and maintain software application programs on different platforms. Especially maintenance was very important to us as maintenance of software systems makes for a large part of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This goal has been realized in DP2, some application programs are maintained with DP2 for more than 15 years.

We use the COBOL programming language for DP2 and the sources generated as COBOL is a highly portable language and supported on most computer systems. When supplier specific options are not used, that is. DP2 has been ported to computer systems as Siemens BS2000, HP-3000 under VME, ICL ME/29 and Perkin-Elmer. The generated code runs not only on these systems but also on IBM MVS, UNIX, Bull DPS/7 under GCOS and even PC-DOS.

DP2's structure consists of the central system inventory, an on-line interface for developpers and functions to generate documentation and application source code. All specifications of the software application are stored in the central system inventory. Developpers can access this system inventory via the on-line interface. They can view, change, insert, delete and automatically generate data in the system inventory. The functions for the generation of documentation generate technical documentation and the base for the user manual. The functions for the generation of application source code generate the COBOL code, the screen forms, the job control procedures to create files and for library management and program execution.