DiBOL or Digital's Business Oriented Language is a general-purpose

General-purpose programming language

In computer software a general-purpose programming language is a programming language designed to be used for writing software in a wide variety of application domains...

, procedural, imperative programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

, which is well-suited for Management Information Systems (MIS) software development. It has a syntax similar to FORTRAN

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

 and BASIC, along with BCD

Binary-coded decimal

In computing and electronic systems, binary-coded decimal is a digital encoding method for numbers using decimal notation, with each decimal digit represented by its own binary sequence. In BCD, a numeral is usually represented by four bits which, in general, represent the decimal range 0 through 9...

 arithmetic. It shares the COBOL

COBOL

COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments....

 program structure of data and procedure divisions.

History

DIBOL was originally marketed by Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...

 (DEC) in 1970.

The original version, DIBOL-8, was produced for PDP-8

PDP-8

The 12-bit PDP-8 was the first successful commercial minicomputer, produced by Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1960s. DEC introduced it on 22 March 1965, and sold more than 50,000 systems, the most of any computer up to that date. It was the first widely sold computer in the DEC PDP series of...

, PDP-11

PDP-11

The PDP-11 was a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a succession of products in the PDP series. The PDP-11 replaced the PDP-8 in many real-time applications, although both product lines lived in parallel for more than 10 years...

 and DIBOL-32 VAX/VMS systems, though it can also be run on other systems through emulator

Emulator

In computing, an emulator is hardware or software or both that duplicates the functions of a first computer system in a different second computer system, so that the behavior of the second system closely resembles the behavior of the first system...

s.

ANSI

American National Standards Institute

The American National Standards Institute is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organization also coordinates U.S. standards with international...

 Standards were released in 1983, 1988 and 1992. The 1992 standard was revised in 2002.

External links

• Official DIBOL site
• ANSI INCITS 165-1992 (R2002) Programming Language DIBOL (Downloadable PDF Standard for purchase from ANSI
  American National Standards Institute
  The American National Standards Institute is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organization also coordinates U.S. standards with international...
  
  )
• Synergex Synergy/DE features the Synergy/DBL DIBOL compiler.