Holos - Language

Language

The Holos Language was a very broad language in that it covered a wide range of statements and concepts, including the reporting system, business rules, OLAP data, SQL data (using the Embedded SQL syntax within the hosting HL), device properties, analysis, forecasting, and data mining. It even supported elements to enable self-documentation and self-verification. Placing all these areas on a common footing, and allowing them to co-operate by sharing data, events, etc., was key to the number of possibilities that resulted. For instance, the report writer supported input as well as output, plus interactive graphics, and a comprehensive event mechanism to pass back information about the viewed data to event handlers. Also, reports and data were separate entities, thus allowing the same report to be applied to different data as long as it was described by similar meta-data. This meant that when terms like EIS and MIS were first coined, the industry norm was "slideshows", i.e. pre-programmed transitions between views, whereas Holos provided data-driven drill-down, i.e. no pre-programmed views or links. The transitions could be made dependent upon the data values and trends, in conjunction with the available business logic.