Getting Started > What is the Concordance Programming Language

The Concordance Programming Language (CPL) is a proprietary structured language designed to help you with your administrative tasks using pre-coded scripts to run the processes for you.

The CPL features promote clear and concise program design through the use of modularity, local and global variables, value returning functions, and predictable program flow. The CPL is written in a language similar to C/C++ in .CPL files. A CPL program consists of a sequence of instructions that tells Concordance how to solve a particular problem. The program will usually contain some amount of data. In CPL, the data can be database fields, text, characters, numbers, and dates. Program instructions are organized by functions. CPL function declarations establish the name of the function, values it will receive when it begins, and the local variables it will use while it is running.

The following example describes the structure of a typical CPL program.

int color;

main()

{

char string[20];

color = 15;

string = "Hello, world";

show(10, 20, string);

return;

}

show(int row, column; char xyz[])

{

puts(row, column, xyz, color);

}

The example program begins with the main() function. main() assigns a value to the global variable color, and to a local variable string. The application then calls the show() function to put the string on the screen. For a simplified tutorial of this code sample, see Tutorial: "Hello World!" in CPL. For more information on using CPL, see Concordance Programming Fundamentals. For the full definition of CPL, see Concordance Programming Language Reference.