Language Facilities for Programming User-Computer Dialogues
Juan M. Lafuente, David Gries · IBM Journal of Research and Development · 1978
Extensions to PASCAL that provide for programming man-computer dialogues are proposed. An interactive application program is viewed as a sequence of frames, representing stages of dialogue activity, and separate computational steps. First, extensions are presented to allow the description of the items of information contained in each frame. Second, PASCAL is extended to allow the inclusion of behavior rules for a frame to specify the interactive dialogue. The behavior rules are specified nonprocedurally. Previously, programming such dialogues has required the specification of all possible interactions and their effects in a procedural fashion.