The Open Programming Language (OPL) is an embedded programming language for portable devices that run the Symbian Operating System, which can be found on e.g. the Nokia 9200, 9300 and 9500 Communicator series mobile telephone/personal digital assistant (PDA) and the Sony Ericsson P800, P900, P910 series. On classic Psion PDAs such as the Series 3, 5/5mx, Series 7, and netBook/netPad, as well as the MC218, OPL is part of the standard application suite. OPL is also included in Psion Teklogix industrial handhelds such as the Workabout mx. OPL is an interpreted language similar to BASIC. A fully Visual Basic-compatible language OVAL has been also developed.
The language was originally called Organiser Programming Language developed by Psion Ltd for the Psion Organiser. The first implementation (without graphics) was for the original Psion Organiser (now referred to as the Psion Organiser I, 1984) and came bundled with the Science, Finance and Math datapaks. It became truly accessible as built in software in the Psion Organiser II (1986) and the language went on to be used in the Psion Series 3 and later. After Psion retired from the PDA market, the project was parked until 2003 when the fledgling Symbian Developer Program released OPL to open source and the acronym was re-interpreted. The language is now developed on SourceForge in the opl-dev project.
To the grievance of the OPL developer community, the language is not available from Symbian OS v8 and later, mainly due to lack of interest and support from major Symbian licencees Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Hence, OPL will most likely never be made available for the newer generation of Symbian OS phones such as Sony Ericsson P990, M600, W950, P1i and Nokia E61i and E90. As of 2010, Nokia device developers are encouraged to use Python for S60 instead (See Python for S60).
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