G
gus bjorklund
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a few comments on the 4GL criticisms made on stackoverflow in 2009: 0) version 7 is more than 20 years old. the post is largely misleading and demonstrates ignorance. 1) true - the 4GL was originally designed for use with character terminals. Windows did not exist then. Later, user interface features for use with Windows were added. 2) recent versions have classes and objects in the 4GL. not that i use them. 3) there has been support for one dimensional arrays since the beginning. better array support would be a good thing but not the highest priority for the type of applications for which the 4GL is used or intended. 4) there is no ISAM. the database is made up of tables, rows, and columns, just like other relational databases. tables can have one or more indexes. on-disk storage layout is quite flexible and can be composed of a single data file or many, depending on requirements. 5) it is true that there are cursors. SQL also uses cursors. the 4GL makes it appear as if all the database data were in the applications address space. you just use it and modify it in the same way as you do program variables. unless you use dynamic queries - in that case the language constructs are a bit different. 6) the compiler sets transaction boundaries if you do not specify them yourself. often they are not what you might want, which is why you can set them yourself. 7) everything can be abbreviated. in retrospect, this was a horrible idea and should be stopped. 8) compiler does NOT assume everything is a database access. that is complete nonsense. 9) IMO, for marketing to be calling the language ABL was a mistake. 10) like most languages it is not perfect and has flaws. 10) lastly, the 4GL was not intended to be a general purpose programming language like C. it was designed to make it easy to write business applications and i believe it still does that fairly well and has done so for 30 years. regards, gus “less is my favorite editor. too bad it can’t actually edit files.” Chris Lesniewski-Laas
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