Bob Hsu's Lexware system was developed in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s at the University of Hawaii linguistics department for building bilingual dictionaries. It is both a hierarchal database format and a system of batch oriented programs written for the Spitbol compiler of the Snobol4 computer language. The the database format is called either 'lexware format' or 'band format'. Here is a copy of the latest version (1990) of the Lexware Manual, which describes the system in detail. As recently as 2013 Bob was working on improving the system, adding a greatly improved invert module. This module generates an index to the dictionary based on specified words in definitions or other fields. Here is the draft description of that new Invert module

The Lexware system has been used since the 1970's by many linguists to build dictionaries of exotic languages. The format is still being used today by a few linguists who find it superior in certain ways to more recently developed dictionary building systems.

The Alabama dictionary was created using a version of the Lexware software and band format. Click here to see a sample of the band-format dictionary. Both the print and hypertext versions of the dictionary were generated from this band-format database. The same, fairly simple, Spitbol (Snobol4) program was used to create both versions. For the print version, the program entered WordPerfect 5.1 codes based on the band label, which is the tag or field marker at the beginning of a record. UT Press used this camera-ready copy for the print version in 1993. For the hypertext version, created in 1999, the program entered HTML markup. The entire hypertext version was created from the band-format version in a few hours including modifying the program for HTML, building the HTML frames, and adjusting colors and font sizes.

The hierarchical structure forced by the band format lends itself to direct conversion into XML. Click here to get a program that will convert any band format file to XML.