A general purpose dialogue processor

• Authors: James L. Black
• Venue: AFIPS '77 Proceedings of the June 13-16, 1977, national computer conference
• Year: 1977

This paper describes work done on the Automatic Program Generator project at the Sperry Research Center. The overall aim of this research is to discover techniques that will make computers more directly accessible to nontechnical users. The approach taken is based on the use of interactive dialogue, using CRT terminals or work stations. A general purpose Dialogue Processor has been implemented whose function is to facilitate the creation and management of interactive dialogues. A high-level Dialogue Specification Language (DSL) is used, in which dialogues are represented as choice trees. Interactions with a user translate into selection or rejection of available paths plus any required data entry. Trees may be specified which present steps in the formulation of commands or transactions in the way that appears most natural to the user. User responses are then mapped into an appropriate format for output to the process that is to be dialogue driven. A Dialogue Editor enables the user to backtrack during a dialogue session, or at a later date to reformulate his responses. The Dialogue Processor is a universal facility which has many potential uses; essentially, it can front-end any parameter or transaction driven system. It is currently being used as an interactive program specification technique in conjunction with an application customizer. Among other possible applications are its use as an aid to formulating complex command language statement (e.g., JCL) and as a query language interface for data bases. We believe that the approach described in this paper, coupled with declining hardware costs and other technological advances, makes it possible to extract increasing benefits from interactive dialogue, while minimizing some of the traditional drawbacks.