A “pile” metaphor for supporting casual organization of information
CHI '92 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
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BUSINESS is a new application development language intended to answer the needs of a rapidly growing user community - the end-user. The underlying computational model is the paper office. BUSINESS instructions manipulate objects within this model in ways analogous to human office workers. The syntax of BUSINESS closely approximates a subset of English. Standard programming functions are embodied in the language in ways that seem natural to first time computer users. For example, to open a file for exclusive read/write access one 'Pulls' a 'Folder' (containing 'Forms' and 'Documents') from a 'Drawer' in a 'File Cabinet'. In the computational model, the Folder is seen to actually move from the Drawer to a 'Desk' belonging to an 'Aide'(the "worker" inside the computer).To support the construction of reliable software within this model, BUSINESS contains a rich repertoire of structured control constructs: execute (procedures), do (routines), go through (a set of objects), test and select one (from a set of 'if - then' instructions). Base data types include: whole numbers, decimal numbers, money, dates, times and characters. The set of operators and tests within BUSINESS support a complete range of data manipulations and logical decisions. Data structures include Fillins (collections of Fields) and Tables (having Entries at Row/Column intersections). Permanent data is organized by Form (collections of Fillins and Tables).