Instrumental Software (ISA) – software intended for use in the design, development and maintenance of programs.
Toolkit software is used in the development phase. Toolkit software is a set of programs used to help programmers in their work, to help software managers in their efforts to control the development process and the resulting products. The most famous representatives of this part of software are programs of translators from programming languages, which help programmers to write machine commands. The tool programs are translators from Fortran, Cobol, Jo-Vial, Basic, APL and Pascal languages. They facilitate the process of creating new working programs. But language translators are only the best known part of tool programs; there are many more.
The use of computing machines to help create new programs is far from obvious to people who are not professional programmers. It often happens, however, that professionals talk about tool (development phase) and system (use phase) software in the same breath, assuming that a non-professional knows about this role of tool software. Just as in the use phase (for application programs), the system software works in the development phase as well, but only in conjunction with the tooling software. Tooling software or programming systems are systems for automating the development of new programs in a programming language.
In the most general case to create a program in the chosen programming language (system programming language) you need to have the following components:
- a text editor to create a program source file.
- A compiler or interpreter. The source code is translated into intermediate object code with the help of a compiler program. The source code of a large program consists of several modules (source code files). Each module is compiled into a separate file with object code, which must then be combined into one whole.
- A linking editor or assembler, which performs the linking of object modules and generates a workable application – executable code – in the output.
The executable code is a complete program that can be run on any computer where the operating system for which the program was created is installed. As a rule, the resulting file has a .EXE or .COM extension.
Recently, visual programming methods (using scripting languages), focused on the creation of Windows applications are widespread. This process is automated in the rapid design environments. In this case, using ready-made visual components, which are set up with the help of special editors.
The most popular editors (program programming systems using visual means) of visual design:
1) Borland Delphi – designed to solve almost any application programming problem.
2) Borland C++ Builder – it is an excellent tool for developing DOS and Windows applications.
3) Microsoft Visual Basic is a popular tool for creating Windows programs.
4) Microsoft Visual C++ is a tool that allows developing any applications running in the environment of OS like Microsoft Windows
Thus the essence of tool software is to create any executable program by converting formally logical expressions into executable machine code, as well as to control and correct it.