28 Macintosh
User's
Handbook
terminology. This contrasts
to
low-level assembly
and
machine
languages in which numbers
and
mnemonics are used to com-
municate instructions
to
the
microprocessor.
At
the time of
writing
of
this book, no high-level programming languages
were available from Apple* for use
on
the Mac. Apple
is
presently in the process
of
writing two such programs,,Macin-
tosh BASIC,
and
Macintosh Pascal. These languages will
differ from those normally used in
that
they will rely heavily
upon the visual interface concept
of
the Mac.
The final category
of
files
is
documents. These types
of
files
do
not
contain programs, so they are never executed in the
sense
that
a system
or
application file
is
executed. Instead,
documents contain information
that
an
application program
needs in order to execute properly. For example, the Mac-
Write'M
word processor
is
considered
an
application, but a file
that contains a memo
or
letter
is
considered a document. Sim-
ilarly, the MacPaint™ graphics program
is
considered
an
appli-
cation, but a file
that
contains a specific illustration
is
called a
document.
In light
of
the different types
of
files, the operation
of
the
computer
can be summarized as follows. When the computer
is
powered on, be sure
that
a set
of
system programs
is
available
to
start
up
the system
and
maintain its operation. Next, acti-
vate
an
application program that performs the desired task.
Finally, access the document
that
contains the information to
be processed. Some applications
do
not require the use
of
documents, so this step
is
not
always necessary.
If
a new
document
is
to
be created, it
is
not necessary to load
an
existing
document. Each application
that
uses documents contains
provisions for creating new documents.
The icons used to represent the commonly used types
of
files are depicted in figure 1.8.
• Microsoft Corp. has released a version of BASIC
for
the Mac.
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