A BIOLOGICALLY‐ORIENTED COMPUTER LANGUAGE *

When the life sciences turned towards computers, their major initial concern was with instrumentation and construction of interfaces between tissue and recording equipment or between recording and digital hardware. During these years of learning, the concept of the computer-based robot slowly emerged. This is basically the idea of the digital computer controlling much of the procedures of data processing or the workings of peripheral instrumentation. However, even some modest accomplishments in this work demand a sophistication in software which simply does not exist in present day computer science development. This is true especially for the environment in which this robot operates or the languages with which it can be instructed. Historically (if such a short period of time as we refer to here can be graced by the term history a t all) we saw impressive developments from crude machine languages to the more vernacular-based and much easier to manipulate problem-oriented language. These languages have answered the need of the scientist who designs a context within which he wants his robot to operate. Our existing vernacular-oriented languages (we prefer this term to problem oriented) such a COBOL, FORTRAN, LISP, etc., still operate on the constructional or comprehensive instructional level. The investigator is still forced to instruct the machine a t each step and build a program of what he wants the computer to do. That is, the person preparing the program still must concern himself with the individual mathematical, logical, or iterative steps required to synthesize a given program or data processing procedure. If the life science investigator prepares the program, he must be willing to spell out the detailed specifications and formats to be used for transmitting his prepared data to the computer and for formatting the computer output in acceptable form. If the life science investigator is also a mathematician and wishes to explore new mathematical and computational techniques, then he may have to spell out and solve in detail computational procedures, such as programming problems. The logical extention of problem oriented languages as well as a fulfillment of the need created by the complex work of the biologist lies in supplying a multi-level language system and environment to the medical and biological investigator, which permits him to instruct the computer to use certain procedures rather than to build these procedures himself. We are speaking