C/AL

C/AL, short for Client/server Application Language, was the programming language of the C/SIDE development environment inside Microsoft Dynamics NAV, formerly known as Navision Attain, and of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central up to and including version 14. It is a database-specific language, used mainly to retrieve, insert and modify records in a Navision database, and its syntax resembles Pascal, the language on which it is based. The original C/AL compiler was written by Michael Nielsen. C/SIDE has no console, so even the classic hello world example is shown through a dialog box, and variables are not declared in code but through a variable declaration menu in the C/AL editor. Filtering and retrieving a record, or looping over a recordset and changing its records, takes only a few lines. The language has since been replaced by AL, which is why it is described in the past tense; the page shows these examples in the Navision setting rather than as a general purpose language.