3. A system in accordance with claim 2 wherein means are provided for operating said computer system to establish an alphanumerically-ordered linkage of the directory entries, and wherein means are also provided for retrieving the status data corresponding to signals in alphanumeric order by following said linkage from a first entry containing a designated signal-name designation.
2. An automatically programmable signal monitoring or process control system for controlling an industrial system or the like comprising: sensor means associated with the apparatus for generating signals indicative of the state of the system; a digital computer system having a memory; signal scanning means associated with said computer system and connecting to said sensor means for scanning said sensor signals periodically and including means for transferring a digital record of the status of said signals into the memory of said digital computer system; at least one machine readable signal-related event definition defining as an event either the periodic scanning or a particular change in the state of at least one sensor signal including a designation which serves as a name for the event and also as a name for the signal, and including a reference to the location in said memory where the status record of the corresponding signal variable is stored; at least one machine readable job definition including at least one triggering reference to a designation which serves as a name for an event and for a signal and which is included in at least one event definition; loader means for operating said computer system to accept said event and job definitions and to store said definitions in said memory; trigger-connect means for operating said computer system to link job definitions, but only those containing trigger references to designations, to locations in said memory that are in turn linked to the event definition and status data for the designated signals; means for operating said computer system to respond to the occurrence of a signal-related event by initiating execution of any and all job definitions which are linked to the status data and definition corresponding to that event; means for operating said computer system to establish a directory within the computer system memory; and means for maintaining within the directory a record of the designations and computer system memory addresses of definitions which have been loaded into the computer system memory and which contain the corresponding designations.