Journal of the ACM (JACM)
An interactive command generating facility
Communications of the ACM
Syntax macros and extended translation
Communications of the ACM
The design of the REXX language
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
Extension and software development
ICSE '88 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Software engineering
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
The design of the REXX language
IBM Systems Journal
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An interactive command language, with its underlying data, defines a command environment. In general a command environment supports a number of commands which once issued perform non-interactively, and which when finished leave the old command environment in control. It also supports some special commands which move to other command environments, after which commands are interpreted according to a different set of rules. The usefulness of a command environment can be extended by programming it, i.e. by dynamically constructing and conditionally executing sequences of its commands; but, unlike a programming language, a command language does not usually contain any general-purpose variables or means for conditional execution. These facilities can however be provided by a command control language, which makes it possible to construct sequences or commands to be issued to the currently active command environment from a program. A command control language is described, and the usefulness, limitations and repercussions of command language programming are discussed.