Comal

Comal can refer to:

Comal is the name of several places:

Comal (cookware)

A comal is a smooth, flat griddle typically used in Mexico and Central America to cook tortillas, toast spices, sear meat, and generally prepare food. Similar cookware is called a budare in South America. Some comals are concave and made of "barro" (clay). These are still made and used by the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America. Comals are similar to the American griddle or the Indian tava, and are often used and named interchangeably with these.

Comals for home use are generally made from heavy cast iron, and sized to fit over either one burner on the stovetop (round) or two burners front to back (elongated oval). In many indigenous and Hispanic cultures, the comal is handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter, the idea being that a comal tempered over many years of usage will heat faster and cook cleaner.

History

The history of such cooking methods dates back to the pre-Columbian era, when nixtamal maize tortillas were cooked on a comal over an open fire. Comales were also used to toast coffee and cacao beans. The word "comal" comes from the Aztec Nahuatl word comalli.

COMAL

COMAL (Common Algorithmic Language) is a computer programming language developed in Denmark by Benedict Løfstedt and Børge R. Christensen in 1973.

The "COMAL 80 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE REPORT" contains the formal definition of the language.

Design

COMAL was created as a mixture of the prevalent educational programming languages of the time, BASIC, Pascal, and, at least in the Commodore and Compis versions, the "turtle graphics" of Logo. The language was meant to introduce structured programming elements in an environment where BASIC would normally be used.

History

In the early 1980s, Apple Computer won a contract to supply Apple II computers running CP/M and COMAL to Irish secondary schools.

In 1984 Acornsoft released a COMAL implementation, by Paul Christensen and Roy Thorton, for their 8-bit BBC Micro and Acorn Electron computers.

Between 1984-1987 TeleNova, a susidiary of the industrial arm of the Swedish Telecoms system, Teli industrier manufactured a desktop PC called "Compis" for the educational sector. An enhanced version of COMAL was supplied as the standard programming language for this PC. Versions were created for both CP/M86 and MS-DOS. The latter version is available for Windows XP. The (Swedish) reference manual is ISBN 91-24-40022-X