Development Process
VME was originally written almost entirely in S3, a specially-designed system programming language based on Algol 68 (however, VME/K was written primarily in the SFL assembly language). Although a high-level language is used, the operating system is not designed to be independent of the underlying hardware architecture: on the contrary, the software and hardware architecture are closely integrated.
From the early 1990s onwards, some entirely new VME subsystems were written partly or wholly in the C programming language.
From its earliest days, VME was developed with the aid of a software engineering repository known as CADES, built for the purpose using an underlying IDMS database. CADES is not merely a version control system for code modules: it manages all aspects of the software lifecycle from requirements capture through to field maintenance. CADES was used in VME module development to hold separate definitions of data structures (Modes), constants (Literals), procedural interfaces and the core algorithms. Multiple versions ('Lives') of each of these components could exist. The algorithms were written in System Development Language (SDL), which was then converted to S3 source by a pre-processor. Multiple versions of the same modules could be generated.
Read more about this topic: ICL VME
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