Ada was designed to be a general-purpose language for everything from business applications to rocket guidance systems. One of its principal features is that it supports real-time applications.

An alternative name for an object, such as a variable, file, or device. See the Using Regular Expressions section in the Working in Multi-Edit chapter.

American National Standards Institute.

American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Pronounced ask-ee, ASCII is a code for representing English characters as numbers, with each letter assigned a number from 0 to 127.

Active Server Pages.

A file that contains a sequence or batch of commands. Batch files are useful for storing sets of commands that are always executed together because you can simply enter the name of the batch file instead of entering each command individually.

Multi-Edit's C-like Macro language. Most of Multi-Edit itself is written in CMac. See A Brief intro to CMac in the Working in Multi-Edit chapter under the Automating Tasks Using Macros section.

Common User Access, a set of standards for user interfaces developed by IBM. The CUA standards deal with interface appearance, programming conventions, and communications.

The dBASE format for storing data has become a de facto standard, and is supported by nearly all database management and spreadsheet systems. Even systems that do not use the dBASE format internally are able to import and export data in dBASE format.

A Rapid Application Development (RAD) system developed by Borland International, Inc. Delphi is similar to Visual Basic from Microsoft, but whereas Visual Basic is based on the BASIC programming language, Delphi is based on Pascal.

FORTRAN 77, Developed in 1977, includes a number of features not available in older versions of FORTRAN.

File Transfer Protocol.

Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML is the language web sites are written in. (Websites may also use DHTML [Dynamic HTML], XHTML, and XML [eXtensible Markup Language]. In addition, Cascading Style Sheets [CSS] and JavaScript may be embedded.)

Integrated Development Environment.

Java is a general purpose programming language with a number of features that make the language well suited for use on the World Wide Web.

A scripting language developed by Netscape to enable Web authors to design interactive sites. (JavaScript is not related to Java.)

A symbol, name, or key that represents a list of commands, actions, or keystrokes. May also refer to a CMac macro, which is a procedure written in CMac. See A Brief intro to CMac in the Working in Multi-Edit chapter under the Automating Tasks Using Macros section.

Short for Multiple Document Interface, a Windows API that features multiple document windows within the parent application’s frame window

Modeless dialog boxes are dialogs which stay on the screen and are available for use at any time but permit other user activities. In Multi-Edit, the transparency of a modeless dialog can be set via Tools | Customize | User Interface – Dialog Transparency.

Modula-2 addresses Pascal’s lack of support for separate compilation of modules and multitasking. Although Modula-2 found support in academia, it is not often used for applications.

Original Equipment Manufacturer.

In linguistics, to divide language into small components that can be analyzed. For example, parsing this sentence would involve dividing it into words and phrases and identifying the type of each component (e.g., verb, adjective, or noun).

Pascal is best known for its affinity to structured programming techniques. The nature of the language forces programmers to design programs methodically and carefully.

Short for Practical Extraction and Report Language, Perl is a programming language developed by Larry Wall, especially designed for processing text. See Perl 5.8 Regular Expressions in the Using Regular Expressions section of the chapter Working in Multi-Edit.

PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is a server-side, HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages.

Regular expressions (“regex's” for short) are sets of symbols and syntactic elements used to match patterns of text. Regular Expressions are described in the Using Regular Expressions section in the Working in Multi-Edit chapter.

A special word reserved by a programming language or by a program. You are not allowed to use reserved words as variable names. For example, in BASIC and COBOL, the word IF is reserved because it has a special meaning.

Structured Query Language, pronounced either see-kwell or as separate letters. SQL is a standardized query language for requesting information from a database.

The Tool Pane is a tabbed pane at the bottom of the Multi-Edit screen.

Uniform Resource Locator, the global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web.

Visual Basic Scripting Edition, a scripting language developed by Microsoft and supported by Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser.

A special symbol that stands for one or more characters. See the Using Regular Expressions section in the Working in Multi-Edit chapter.

Pronounced wizzy-wig, stands for what you see is what you get. A WYSIWYG application is one that enables you to see on the display screen exactly what will appear when the document is printed.