How C/AL Evolved

During the first introduction with the Dynamics NAV as a developer one of the first question would come in your mind is "Which programming language does it support?" and once you hear the answer "C/AL", the next question will follow up is "What other programming language is it similar to?" The best response is "Pascal".


Pascal was a preferred language while the three founders were pursuing their classes. Some of the strengths of Pascal as a tool in an educational environment also attracted the founders to make it a base in order to create a good model for Navision's business applications development.

Michael Nielsen of Microsoft, developed the original C/AL compiler and IDE. Speaking about C/AL and C/SIDE, he told that the design criteria were to provide an environment that could be used without:
  • Dealing with memory and other resource handling
  • Thinking about exception handling and state
  • Thinking about database transactions and rollbacks
  • Knowing about set operations (SQL)
  • Knowing about OLAP (SIFT)
Summarizing Michael's additional comments, the goals of the language and IDE design were to: 
  • Allow the developer to focus on design, not coding, but still allow flexibility
  • Provide a syntax based on Pascal stripped of complexities, especially relating to memory management
  • Provide a limited set of predefined object types, reducing the complexity and learning curve
  • Implement database versioning for a consistent and reliable view of the database
  • Make the developer and end user more at home by borrowing a large number of concepts from Office, Windows, Access, and other Microsoft products 
Please click the below link to download the C/AL programming guide:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/a/2/fa2612d0-9fef-4517-b7ee-d7adbe54c3e6/navision_c-al.pdf

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