THE BASIS FOR USER-ORIENTED, CONTEXT SENSITIVE FUNCTIONS

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The basis for user-oriented, context sensitive functions This chapter discusses the various generations of computer software. Although the concepts of user-orientation and of context sensitivity are not new, their combination may lead to a new generation of computing software. The traditional set of advancing generations of computer software is based on increases in the power of the programmer to use the computer. This increasing power is often associated with an increasing user-orientation in the design of programming instructions. However, despite major improvements in programming languages through the successive generations, their level of user-orientation has not yet encompassed the typical end user. The first three traditional generations of software are primarily oriented towards programming the computer as a general purpose machine. They accomplish this by using increasing levels of user-oriented instructions. The move from the first generation machine language to the second generation low-level languages primarily increased the speed of programming by replacing numeric instruction codes with mnemomics. The third generation both increased the speed of programming and decreased the number of instructions used by the development of high level instructions. The main advance of the fourth generation is the introduction of the concept of nonprocedural programming. The previous generations of languages require the developer to tell the computer both what is required and how the procedural component to achieve it. With nonprocedural languages, the developer only specifies what is required. In the fifth generation of software, languages such as prolog attempt to generalize their non-procedural nature while providing the programmer with relational capabilities beyond those of previous generations. The fifth generation software, however, does not extend non-proceduralism to the typical end user who is not a 5GL programmer.