Business Application Language (BAL) refers to one of many offshoots of the

BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...

language and should not be confused with IBM's well-established

Basic assembly language Basic Assembly Language (BAL) is the commonly used term for a low-level programming language used on IBM System/360 and successor mainframes. Originally, "Basic Assembly Language" applied only to an extremely restricted dialect designed to run unde ...

History

Business Application Language was originally defined by

Honeywell Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building technologies, performance ma ...

in 1973 and the major diffusion was in their system '80-'90 in

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

with the work of French firm Prologue S.A. that used BAL for programming on their proprietary Operative System (Prologue). In 1986 the language was ported to the

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

platform by GuyPes. The first development environment, named Balix, are distributed starting in 1988 in Italy and France. A different evolution path was made by Prologue S.A., named ABAL, in 1992. The evolution of Balix, developed in

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical re ...

, is called B2U (an acronym for Business under UNIX) developed by GuyPes, and are used for a Banking Information System that are used by one hundred banks in Italy.

References

External links

* GuyPes: http://www.guypes.it * GuyPes B2U: http://b2u.guypes.it/ BASIC programming language family {{compu-lang-stub