U/PL: The Utility Programming Language Standard

The availability of inexpensive and easy to program microcontrollers and a resurgence in "techno-archeology" has spurred a great deal of interest in the "dead languages" of the past. Cobol, Forth, Fortran, APL, PL/I, Algol, Pascal and BASIC have experienced a renaissance and are once again being put to use - both by amateurs and professionals. New languages are being developed that expand on or mirror these earlier languages - but unlike those earlier languages which were intended for general purpose use, these Utility Programming Languages are designed and implemented to perform specific functions on electro-mechanical and/or state-machine systems. The U/PL Standard is designed to promote the interchangeability of these Utility Languages and their programs among a variety of microcontrollers and low power microprocessors. In addition to supporting these procedural and functional systems that are built around them, Utility Programming also seeks to retain limited backwards-compatibility with the ECMA and ANSI standards which were supported from the late 1970's to early 1990's. Utility Language Implementations and their programs which conform to this Standard will be classified as written in "U/PL".