Fourth-generation programming language

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A fourth-generation programming language (4GL) is a high-level computer programming language that belongs to a class of languages envisioned as an advancement upon third-generation programming languages (3GL). Each of the programming language generations aims to provide a higher level of abstraction of the internal computer hardware details, making the language more programmer-friendly, powerful, and versatile. While the definition of 4GL has changed over time, it can be typified by operating more with large collections of information at once rather than focusing on just bits and bytes. Languages claimed to be 4GL may include support for database management, report generation, mathematical optimization, GUI development, or web development. Some researchers state that 4GLs are a subset of domain-specific languages. [1] [2]

Contents

The concept of 4GL was developed from the 1970s through the 1990s, overlapping most of the development of 3GL, with 4GLs identified as "non-procedural" or "program-generating" languages, contrasted with 3GLs being algorithmic or procedural languages. While 3GLs like C, C++, C#, Java, and JavaScript remain popular for a wide variety of uses, 4GLs as originally defined found uses focused on databases, reports, and websites. [3] Some advanced 3GLs like Python, Ruby, and Perl combine some 4GL abilities within a general-purpose 3GL environment, [4] and libraries with 4GL-like features have been developed as add-ons for most popular 3GLs, producing languages that are a mix of 3GL and 4GL, blurring the distinction. [5]

In the 1980s and 1990s, there were efforts to develop fifth-generation programming languages (5GL).

History

Though used earlier in papers and discussions, the term 4GL was first used formally by James Martin in his 1981 book Application Development Without Programmers [6] to refer to non-procedural, high-level specification languages. In some primitive way, early 4GLs were included in the Informatics MARK-IV (1967) product and Sperry's MAPPER (1969 internal use, 1979 release).

The motivations for the '4GL' inception and continued interest are several. The term can apply to a large set of software products. It can also apply to an approach that looks for greater semantic properties and implementation power. Just as the 3GL offered greater power to the programmer, so too did the 4GL open up the development environment to a wider population.

The early input scheme for the 4GL supported entry of data within the 72-character limit of the punched card (8 bytes used for sequencing) where a card's tag would identify the type or function. With judicious use of a few cards, the 4GL deck could offer a wide variety of processing and reporting capability whereas the equivalent functionality coded in a 3GL could subsume, perhaps, a whole box or more of cards. [7]

The 72-character format continued for a while as hardware progressed to larger memory and terminal interfaces. Even with its limitations, this approach supported highly sophisticated applications.

As interfaces improved and allowed longer statement lengths and grammar-driven input handling, greater power ensued. An example of this is described on the Nomad page.

Another example of Nomad's power is illustrated by Nicholas Rawlings in his comments for the Computer History Museum about NCSS (see citation below). He reports that James Martin asked Rawlings for a Nomad solution to a standard problem Martin called the Engineer's Problem: "give 6% raises to engineers whose job ratings had an average of 7 or better." Martin provided a "dozen pages of COBOL, and then just a page or two of Mark IV, from Informatics." Rawlings offered the following single statement, performing a set-at-a-time operation...

The development of the 4GL was influenced by several factors, with the hardware and operating system constraints having a large weight. When the 4GL was first introduced, a disparate mix of hardware and operating systems mandated custom application development support that was specific to the system in order to ensure sales. One example is the MAPPER system developed by Sperry. Though it has roots back to the beginning, the system has proven successful in many applications and has been ported to modern platforms. The latest variant is embedded in the BIS [8] offering of Unisys. MARK-IV is now known as VISION:BUILDER and is offered by Computer Associates.

Santa Fe railroad used MAPPER to develop a system, in a project that was an early example of 4GL, rapid prototyping, and programming by users. [9] The idea was that it was easier to teach railroad experts to use MAPPER than to teach programmers the "intricacies of railroad operations". [10]

One of the early (and portable) languages that had 4GL properties was Ramis developed by Gerald C. Cohen at Mathematica, a mathematical software company. Cohen left Mathematica and founded Information Builders to create a similar reporting-oriented 4GL, called FOCUS.

Later 4GL types are tied to a database system and are far different from the earlier types in their use of techniques and resources that have resulted from the general improvement of computing with time.

An interesting twist to the 4GL scene is realization that graphical interfaces and the related reasoning done by the user form a 'language' that is poorly understood.

Types

A number of different types of 4GLs exist:

Some 4GLs have integrated tools that allow for the easy specification of all the required information:

Low code environments

In the twenty-first century, 4GL systems have emerged as "low code" environments or platforms for the problem of rapid application development in short periods of time. Vendors often provide sample systems such as CRM, contract management, bug tracking from which development can occur with little programming. [11]

Examples

General use / versatile

Database query languages

Report generators

Extract data from files or database to create reports in a wide range of formats is done by the report generator tools.

Data manipulation, analysis, and reporting languages

Software creators

Mathematical optimization

Database-driven GUI application development

Low code / No code development platforms

Source: [12] [13]

Screen painters and generators

Web development languages

Music Programming language

See also

Related Research Articles

Informix-4GL is a 4GL programming language developed by Informix during the mid-1980s. At the time of its initial release in 1986, supported platforms included Microsoft Xenix, DEC Ultrix, Altos 2086, AT&T 3B2, AT&T 3B5, AT&T 3B20 and AT&T Unix PC.

Adabas, a contraction of “adaptable database system," is a database package that was developed by Software AG to run on IBM mainframes. It was launched in 1971 as a non-relational database. As of 2019, Adabas is marketed for use on a wider range of platforms, including Linux, Unix, and Windows.

Clarion is a commercial, proprietary, fourth-generation programming language (4GL), multi-paradigm, programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) from SoftVelocity used to program database applications. It is compatible with indexed sequential access method (ISAM), Structured Query Language (SQL), and ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) data access methods, reads and writes several flat file desktop database formats including ASCII, comma-separated values (CSV), DOS (binary), FoxPro, Clipper, dBase, and some relational databases via ODBC, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase SQL Anywhere, and Oracle Database through the use of accelerated native database drivers, and XML, Clarion can be used to output to HTML, XML, plain text, and Portable Document Format (PDF), among others.

PROIV, also known as 'Pro-IV', is now marketed as a low code development platform by its current steward, Zellis Holdings, a British HR services company.

FOCUS is a fourth-generation programming language (4GL) computer programming language and development environment that is used to build database queries. Produced by Information Builders Inc., it was originally developed for data handling and analysis on the IBM mainframe. Subsequently versions for minicomputers and such as the VAX and other platforms were implemented. FOCUS was later extended to personal computers and to the World Wide Web: the WebFOCUS product.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenEdge Advanced Business Language</span> Business application development language

OpenEdge Advanced Business Language, or OpenEdge ABL for short, is a business application development language created and maintained by Progress Software Corporation. Typically classified as a fourth-generation programming language, it uses an English-like syntax to simplify software development. The language was called PROGRESS or Progress 4GL up until version 9, but in 2006 PSC changed the name to OpenEdge Advanced Business Language in order to overcome a presumed industry perception that 4GLs were less capable than other languages.

In computer science, automatic programming is a type of computer programming in which some mechanism generates a computer program to allow human programmers to write the code at a higher abstraction level.

NOMAD is a relational database and fourth-generation language (4GL), originally developed in the 1970s by time-sharing vendor National CSS. While it is still in use today, its widest use was in the 1970s and 1980s. NOMAD supports both the relational and hierarchical database models.

RAMIS is a fourth-generation programming language (4GL) capable of creating and maintaining databases consisting of named files containing both numeric and alphabetic fields and subsequently producing detailed simple or complex reports using a very simple English like language. As such it is easily mastered by non-programmers. A typical program - either to create or maintain a database or to create quite complex reports - would normally consist of a handful of lines of code which could be written or understood by non-professional programmers. "End users" as they became known. Such end users could be trained to use RAMIS in a matter of days and so large companies would often have several hundred such users scattered throughout the company.

LINC is a fourth-generation programming language, used mostly on Unisys computer systems.

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References

  1. ↑ 35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 1002 Domain-Specific Languages for Software Engineering Archived May 16, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
  2. ↑ Arie van Deursen; Paul Klint; Joost Visser (1998). "Domain-Specific witness Languages:An Annotated Bibliography". Archived from the original on 2009-02-02. Retrieved 2009-03-15.
  3. ↑ MacDonell, Stephen (November 1993). "Software development, CASE tools and 4GLs—A survey of New Zealand usage. Part 1: 750 New Zealand organisations". hdl: 10523/928 .{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  4. ↑ "Roger Clarke's Software Generations".
  5. ↑ "Definition of fourth-generation language". PCMAG. Retrieved 7 May 2020.
  6. ↑ Martin, James. Application Development Without Programmers. Prentice-Hall, 1981. ISBN   0-13-038943-9.
  7. ↑ "IBM Punch Cards". www.columbia.edu. Archived from the original on 2019-02-16. Retrieved 2019-02-03.
  8. ↑ "Data Mining Software, Data Analysis, and More: Unisys Business Information Server Features". Unisys . 2006-08-21. Archived from the original on 2006-08-21. Retrieved 2019-02-03.
  9. ↑ Louis Schlueter (1988). User-Designed Computing: The Next Generation. [book on report generator and MAPPER systems]
  10. ↑ Barbara Canning McNurlin; Ralph H. Sprague (2004). "Ch. 9". Information Systems Management in Practice (PDF). Pearson/Prentice Hall. ISBN   978-0-13-101139-7.[ permanent dead link ]
  11. ↑ Forrest, Conner. "How Salesforce is using low-code orchestration to save 'floundering IoT projects'". ZDNet.
  12. ↑ Marvin, Rob (August 10, 2018). "The Best Low-Code Development Platforms for 2019". PCMAG.
  13. ↑ Sayer, Martin Heller and Peter (6 April 2018). "25 simple tools for building mobile apps fast". InfoWorld. Archived from the original on 18 November 2017. Retrieved 17 November 2017.
  14. ↑ "DronaHQ. Build apps without coding". www.dronahq.com. Archived from the original on 2019-08-09. Retrieved 2019-09-11.
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