Fourth-generation Programming Language

The term 4GL was first used by James Martin in his 1982 book '' Applications Development Without Programmers '' to refer to non-procedural, high-level Specification Language s. Nevertheless, the great majority of 4GL users would describe themselves as programmers and most 4GLs allowed for (or required) system logic to be written in a proprietary Macro Language or a 3GL.

All 4GLs are designed to reduce programming effort, the time it takes to develop software, and the cost of software development. They are not always successful in this task, sometimes resulting in inelegant and unmaintainable code. However, given the right problem, the use of an appropriate 4GL can be spectacularly successful.

A number of different types of 4GLs exist:

Report Generator s take a description of the data format and the report to generate and from that they either generate the required report directly or they generate a program to generate the report.

Similarly, Forms Generator s manage online interactions with the application system users or generate programs to do so.

More ambitious 4GLs (sometimes termed ''fourth generation environments'') attempt to automatically generate whole systems from the outputs of CASE tools, specifications of screens and reports, and possibly also the specification of some additional processing logic.

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

James Martin's own ''Information Engineering'' Systems Development Methodology was automated to allow the input of the results of system analysis and design in the form of Data Flow Diagram s, Entity Relationship Diagram s, Entity Life History Diagram s etc from which hundreds of thousands of lines of COBOL would be generated overnight.

More recently Oracle Corporation 's Oracle Designer and Oracle Developer 4GL products could be integrated to produce database definitions and the forms and reports programs.

Fourth-generation languages have often been compared to Domain-specific Programming Language s (DSLs). Some researchers state that 4GLs are a sub-set of DSLs. {Link without Title}

SOME SUCCESSFUL FOURTH-GENERATION LANGUAGES

Database query languages

--- FOCUS

---Oracle PL/SQL

--- NATURAL

--- Progress 4GL

--- SQL

Report generators

--- BuildProfessional

--- GEMBase

---IDL-PV/WAVE

--- LINC

--- Metafont

--- NATURAL

--- Oracle Reports

--- PostScript

--- RPG-II

--- S

---Gauss

--- Mathematica

Data manipulation, analysis, and reporting languages

--- Clarion Programming Language

--- Ab Initio

--- ABAP

--- Aubit-4GL

--- DASL

--- FOCUS

--- GraphTalk

--- Informix-4GL

--- NATURAL

--- Nomad

--- Ramis

--- SAS

--- Synon

--- CorVision

Data-stream languages

---APE

---AVS

---Iris Explorer

Screen painters and generators

---Oracle Forms

--- Unify Accell

GUI creators

--- 4th Dimension (Software)

--- Delphi Programming Language

--- EDeveloper

--- MATLAB 's GUIDE

--- Revolution Programming Language

--- Visual Basic

--- OpenROAD

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Fourth-generation Programming Language