Work Flow Language, or WFL ("''wiffle''") is the process control language for the

Burroughs large systems The Burroughs Large Systems Group produced a family of large 48-bit mainframes using stack machine instruction sets with dense syllables.E.g., 12-bit syllables for B5000, 8-bit syllables for B6500 The first machine in the family was the B5000 in ...

, including the

Unisys Unisys Corporation is an American multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting company headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. It provides digital workplace solutions, cloud, applications, and infrastructure solutions, ...

ClearPath/MCP series, and their

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

Master Control Program The MCP (Master Control Program) is the operating system of the Burroughs small, medium and large systems, including the Unisys Clearpath/MCP systems. MCP was originally written in 1961 in ESPOL (Executive Systems Problem Oriented Language). In ...

. Developed soon after the B5000 in 1961, WFL is the ClearPath equivalent of the

Job Control Language Job Control Language (JCL) is a name for scripting languages used on IBM mainframe operating systems to instruct the system on how to run a batch job or start a subsystem. More specifically, the purpose of JCL is to say which programs to run, ...

(JCL) on IBM mainframes and the shell scripts of

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

operating systems. Unlike JCL, WFL is a high-level structured language complete with subroutines (procedures and functions) with

arguments An argument is a statement or group of statements called premises intended to determine the degree of truth or acceptability of another statement called conclusion. Arguments can be studied from three main perspectives: the logical, the dialectic ...

and high-level program

control flow In computer science, control flow (or flow of control) is the order in which individual statements, instructions or function calls of an imperative program are executed or evaluated. The emphasis on explicit control flow distinguishes an ''im ...

instructions. WFL programs are

compiled In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...

to binary executables like any other MCP subject. WFLWork Flow Language (WFL) Programming Reference Manual. ClearPath MCP Release 10.0 or Later. 8600 1047-507 Unisys Corporation. 2005 is used for high-level system operations, such as running tasks, moving and copying files, providing high-level recoverability. Thus it is not a general purpose language in that you would not use it to do general computations. You can open and close files to check their attributes for example; however, you cannot read or change their contents in WFL – that you do in a general purpose language, and invoke it as a task from WFL. WFL has a high-level

ALGOL ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ...

-like readable syntax. It has none of the low-level assembler-like commands of JCL like //SYSIN DD, etc. in order to connect hardware devices and open files for programs. All WFL constructs deal with the high-level abstractions of tasks and files. Parameters are also real HLL parameters, not the $1, $2... style position parameters of shell scripts. WFL also has an instruction block command which is used to give operators instructions needed to run the current job. These instructions are displayed using the 'IB' operator command. WFL was a compiled language on the medium systems. Because some OS interfaces may change from release to release, Medium Systems WFL code included a copy of the source in the object file. Upon executing a WFL job it would check to determine if the object was compatible with the OS version. If not it would trigger a recompile of the object using the source embedded in the object code.

Sources

ALGOL 60 dialect Burroughs mainframe computers Scripting languages Mainframe computer software

See also

Sources