ICL VME - Development Process

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

Famous quotes containing the words development and/or process:

    I’ve always been impressed by the different paths babies take in their physical development on the way to walking. It’s rare to see a behavior that starts out with such wide natural variation, yet becomes so uniform after only a few months.
    Lawrence Kutner (20th century)

    I’m not suggesting that all men are beautiful, vulnerable boys, but we all started out that way. What happened to us? How did we become monsters of feminist nightmares? The answer, of course, is that we underwent a careful and deliberate process of gender training, sometimes brutal, always dehumanizing, cutting away large chunks of ourselves. Little girls went through something similarly crippling. If the gender training was successful, we each ended up being half a person.
    Frank Pittman (20th century)