COMPOSE/PRODUCE
William D. Williams, Philip R. Bartram · 1967
At present there are numerous report program generators, most of which are quite similar in purpose and in method of operation. Although they generally relieve the programmer from concern with detailed program logic, they nevertheless require him to have intimate knowledge of the characteristics of his data base, the kinds of entries he wants extracted, the manipulations to be performed, and the detailed format of the desired report. Furthermore, as report program generators have become more generalized (and thus more flexible), they have also become more complex, requiring the user to furnish complicated specification statements in coded form. This, of course, demands an increased amount of training and experience on the part of the programmer, and makes his source programs more subject to error.