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CANDE

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This article refers the mainframe text editor. For the IEEE technical society, see Computer-Aided Design Technical Committee.
For Candé, the French commune of Maine-et-Loire, see Candé.

CANDE (Command AND Edit) is a command line shell and text editor on the MCP (Master Control Program) operating system which runs on the Unisys Clearpath series of mainframes. Originally implemented on Burroughs large systems, it was first deployed in the mid-1960s [however, below it says that CANDE wasn't written until 1973, making it the first software to travel backwards in time]. It has a range of features for changing the OS environment, programming and the like.

Its full name is CANDE MCS. MCS, or Message Control Subsystem is the general form of a systems program in the Burroughs architecture (other than MCP the control program). As an MCS CANDE is more than just an editor as it provides overall control for a network of users.

The editing capabilities of CANDE are anachronistic for casual (as opposed to scripted) editing as they predate full screen and graphical editors.

Features

CANDE provides a command line interpreter and line editor. Other notable features and functions include:

  • Create, edit, and maintain (copy, remove, print) data and program files
  • Compile and execute programs
  • Access and display information about the data communication network including lines and remote devices
  • Dynamically alter the communication network
  • Access and display job and task information

In addition to these features CANDE has an on-line help facility.

Implementation

For extra speed, CANDE implemented user context switching by swapping a block at the top of the stack. This novel method broke several assumptions built into the design of Burroughs large systems, in particular the handling of virtual memory descriptors, and meant that CANDE itself had to be written in DCALGOL with system-level privileges.

Architecturally, CANDE is split into two main sections: a primary, single-instanced main process, and one or more worker stacks. The main process is called BUMP. It receives all input messages, including input from users. Simple requests which can be executed without delay and do not involve any I/O (such as disk access) are handled immediately. Other requests are added to a work queue and handled by one of the worker processes. The worker process is called GRIND; there can be one or more instances at any time. Each GRIND process has by default five pseudo-threads which actually carry out the work.

The internal threading model for context switching selects one of the worker pseudo-threads per GRIND process and makes it the executing context. This is achieved by copying it to the top of the stack. When the worker process needs to execute I/O or other asynchronous activity, it marks what it is waiting for, and calls the context-switching function, which selects a different context for execution.

CANDE operates without internal locks, by careful separation of data. Each possible user connection (or station) is assigned an index into a main array called the station array, or STA ("stay"). The current station index is called STAX (or "stay-x"). There are multiple words of data per station, but they are stored with all of the first words together, followed by all of the second words, etc. This allows CANDE to index into the array using only addition, not multiplication (which made for faster operation on the hard-wired CPUs of the era).

CANDE was originally written in 1973 by Darrel F. High. It was taken over by Randall Gellens in 1984, at which point the library maintenance (file copying, moving, renaming, and deleting) routines were rewritten to allow for significantly expanded capabilities, a slew of utilities were added using the "?" syntax (allowing them to be used even while a program was running), and several architectural improvements were made. It was later transferred to the Santa Barbara plant, and eventually to India.

The "?" syntax, originally allowing for control during program execution (when input would normally be directed to the program), grew to include a number of utilities. For example, the "?CALC" command allowed both general calculator and a number of programming debugging functionality. "Using ?CALC," a programmer could execute many system intrinsics and see the results in a variety of formats (such as decimal, hex, EBCDIC).

See also

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