The text read off it
[page 10]
Outline of Manual
The careful reader may have noticed what appears to be an error in line 03: there seems to be an imbedded period missing in ACCOUNT BALANCE. However, the omission is deliberate; this is an example of name qualification. Remember that in an ordinary name, a blank indicates the start of a new word. Here, BALANCE is the name of a field of data; ACCOUNT is the name of a record, which includes a number of fields. The idea of using record names to qualify field names is that certain field names might be fairly common, and that the programmer should not be required to think up unique names for every field in every record. Instead, he can name the fields in any way that seems reasonable and then identify each field by the record in which it appears. Thus, in our example, ACCOUNT BALANCE means the field BALANCE which appears in the record ACCOUNT. Of course, a name qualifier is not required if a particular name is, in fact, unique.
There is one other new point to notice in this example. On lines 04 and 05 we have:
MOVE 'INTEREST' TO ACTION.
The quotation marks indicate that the word INTEREST itself is to be moved to the area named ACTION. Thus INTEREST is identified by the quotation marks as being an alphameric literal. An alphameric literal may contain any characters except the quotation mark.
The following pages are devoted to a detailed description of the Commercial Translator language and its application. The description proceeds as follows:
Chapter 2—This chapter covers the elements, or components, of the Commercial Translator language and describes the overall structure of the language.
Chapter 3—The procedure-describing part of the language is discussed in this chapter. The various Commercial Translator verbs and the commands in which they appear are explained in detail.
Chapter 4—The rules and conventions for stating the data description are covered in this chapter.
Appendices—
- A sample payroll program written in the Commercial Translator language is presented in Appendix 1.
- Appendix 2 contains supplementary information of various kinds for reference purposes.
- A glossary of terms is included in Appendix 3.