Progress新的開發語言ABL(其實推出有段時間了)

ABL: Advanced Business Language, is a high-level procedural rogramming language.

By the time you study it, you will be competent to build thoroughly modern applications that take advantage of most of the language’s features. And you will use the language to build powerful business application logic, not just the toy demonstration windows you find in other language tutorials. ABL is not a toy. It’s a tool for serious developers who have serious business problems to solve.

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ABL includes powerful statements and keywords that are specialized for building business applications. Single programming statements in ABL can do the work of dozens or possibly hundreds of lines of code in a standard 3GL, such as Visual Basic, Java, or C++. A single ABL statement can bring data all the way from the application database to the user interface, or return a user’s changes back to the database. Other statements let you program with great precision, even down to the level of extracting individual bits from a data stream. This flexibility is what gives ABL its great power as a development language. Most of the development tools you use to develop OpenEdge applications are themselves written in ABL.

ABL-based applications can be brought from one release to the next largely without change. ABL provides a degree of compatibility and upward migration from one release to the next unmatched (unattempted, really) by any other high-level programming language.