PowerOn, a programming language - Part 2

## Background

PowerOn was created by San Diego company Symitar for use in their credit union-centric banking platform and database "Episys". Originally titled "Report Generator", PowerOn was designed to allow credit unions custom reporting functionality. These custom reports were (and still are) referred to as "RepGens" which refers to PowerOn's predecessor Report Generator. 

PowerOn's background as both a report generation language and custom banking solution are the basis for the best and worst features of the language. 

With report generation in mind let's look back at our "Hello World" example:

    TARGET = ACCOUNT
    PRINT TITLE = "HELLO.WORLD"
     PRINT "Hello, world!"
     NEWLINE
    END

The first line tells Episys that our report will be run on the ACCOUNT level. We'll get into more details about TARGET later on in the series, but for this example it isn't significant beyond the fact that a TARGET is required for the program to run. The second line, `PRINT TITLE = "HELLO.WORLD"` starts the `PRINT` division of the program and sets the title of the report to "HELLO.WORLD". `PRINT` is the PowerOn equivalent to Java's `System.out.print` and `NEWLINE` is just syntax sugar for `PRINT CTRLCHR(10)`.<sup class="citation">The PRINT command ignores escape characters so we use the built-in function CTRLCHR(10) which returns the ASCII character 0x0A: '\n'.</sup>

Symitar was acquired by Jack Henry & Associates in 2000 for $44 million dollars.<sup class="citation">Jack Henry & Associates to Acquire Symitar Systems</sup> 
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