High-level language extensions for user-interface programming

Many user-interface toolkits, screen management facilities and user-interface management systems (UIMS) have been developed for creating user interfaces. These systems, however, normally require the user to learn a new programming language or set of techniques. Extending conventional programming languages has the advantage that the same language can be used for describing both the application and the user interface. This paper outlines several drawbacks of conventional high-level procedural languages and presents extensions to Pascal to facilitate user-interface programming. The goal is to provide a language where the display items, dialogue control rules, application software, concurrent operations, and dynamic program linking can all be easily programmed in the same language, without resorting to an assembler language or another language