The Common Business Communication Language (CBCL) is a communications language proposed by
John McCarthy that foreshadowed much of
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. ...
. The language consists of a basic framework of hierarchical markup derived from
S-expression
In computer programming, an S-expression (or symbolic expression, abbreviated as sexpr or sexp) is an expression in a like-named notation for nested list (tree-structured) data. S-expressions were invented for and popularized by the programming la ...
s, coupled with some general principles about use and extensibility. Although written in 1975, the proposal was not published until 1982, and to this day remains relatively obscure.
External links
John McCarthy's original CBCL proposal, webified and with a 1998 appendix considering some of the then-current work going on with XML and other communications languages.
Data modeling languages