Business Application Language (BAL) refers to one of many offshoots of the BASIC language and should not be confused with IBM's well-established Basic Assembly Language.
Business Application Language was originally defined by Honeywell in 1973 and the major diffusion was in their system '80-'90 in Europe with the work of French firm Prologue S.A. that used BAL for programming on their proprietary Operative System (Prologue).
In 1986 the language was ported to the Unix platform by GuyPes. The first development environment, named Balix, are distributed starting in 1988 in Italy and France. A different evolution path was made by Prologue S.A., named ABAL, in 1992.
The evolution of Balix, developed in Italy, is called B2U (an acronym for Business under UNIX) developed by GuyPes, and are used for a Banking Information System that are used by one hundred banks in Italy.
Famous quotes containing the words business, application and/or language:
“One of the necessary qualifications of an efficient business man in these days of industrial literature seems to be the ability to write, in clear and idiomatic English, a 1,000-word story on how efficient he is and how he got that way.... It seems that the entire business world were devoting its working hours to the creation of a school of introspective literature.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“The receipt to make a speaker, and an applauded one too, is short and easy.—Take of common sense quantum sufficit, add a little application to the rules and orders of the House, throw obvious thoughts in a new light, and make up the whole with a large quantity of purity, correctness, and elegancy of style.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“A mind enclosed in language is in prison.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)