Originally implemented on Burroughs large systems,[1] it has a range of features for interacting with the operating system execution environment, focused on executing, editing and compiling programs, and creating, copying, moving, renaming, and deleting files in general.
For extra speed, CANDE implemented user context switching by swapping a block at the top of the stack.
This novel method broke several assumptions built into the design of Burroughs large systems, in particular the handling of virtual memory descriptors, and meant that CANDE itself had to be written in DCALGOL with system-level privileges.
Simple requests which can be executed without delay and do not involve any I/O such as disk access are handled immediately.
This allows CANDE to index into the array using only addition, not multiplication (which made for faster operation on the hard-wired CPUs of the era).
[disputed – discuss] It was taken over by Randall Gellens in 1984, at which point the library maintenance (file copying, moving, renaming, and deleting) routines were rewritten to allow for significantly expanded capabilities, a slew of utilities were added using the "?"