A format language
Alan J. Perlis · Communications of the ACM · 1964
One of the most primitive parts of a formula language is its specification of input-output actions within the framework of the language. While the specification is intrinsically more complex, say, than the evaluation of an arithmetic expression, most of the difficulties associated with input-output specification arise from the fact that the desired operations have not been properly defined using the framework of a programming language . Indeed, the complexity largely disappears when a programming language is constructed to specify input-output actions. The point to be made here is that the definition of an appropriate programming language makes more rational and simpler all three phases of the input-output programming cycle: (i) source program construction, (ii) object program construction, (iii) object program execution.