General Purpose Work Flow Languages General Purpose Work Flow Languages *

Work ow management requires language support for work ow speciication and task speciication. Many approaches and systems for work ow managementtherefore ooer at least one new language for work ow speciication; task speciication is usually done in a traditional language. This is motivated in particular by the fact that many components already exist and the task of the work ow tool is the speciication of the interaction between these components. The intention of this article is to demonstrate that a general purpose programming language can serve both aspects. We do not really see the need to develop yet another language that a user or application programmer must learn. If an existing programming language like C or Prolog is extended towards work ow capabilities, it is easy to reuse autonomous existing software components and to build interfaces among them.