Programming Language for Business

Programming Language for Business or PL/B is a business-oriented programming language originally called DATABUS and designed by Datapoint in the early 1970s as an alternative to COBOL because its 8-bit computers could not fit COBOL into their limited memory, and because COBOL did not at the time have facilities to deal with Datapoint's built-in keyboard and screen.

A version of DATABUS became an ANSI standard, and the name PL/B was adopted when Datapoint refused to release its trademark on the DATABUS name.

Much like Java and .NET, PL/B programs are compiled into an intermediate byte-code, which is then interpreted by a runtime library. Because of this, many PL/B programs can run on DOS, Unix, Linux, and Windows operating systems. The PL/B development environments are influenced by Java and Visual Basic, and offer many of the same features found in those languages. PL/B (Databus) is actively used all over the world, and has several forums on the Internet dedicated to supporting software developers.

Since its inception, PL/B has been enhanced and adapted to keep it modernized and able to access various data sources. It has a database capability built-in with ISAM and Associative Hashed Indexes, as well as ODBC, SQL, Oracle, sequential, random access, and XML files.

All the constructs of modern programming languages have been incrementally added to the language. PL/B also has the ability to access external routines through COM, DLL's and .NET assemblies. Full access to the .NET framework is built into many versions.

Several implementations of the language are capable of running as an Application Server like Citrix, and connecting to remote databases through a data manager.

External links

• ANSI PL/B Standards Committee
• MMCC PL/B programming notebook
• DB/C DX, DATABUS, and PL/B Overview