Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!TRANSARC.COM!Jim_Troester From: Jim_Troester@TRANSARC.COM Newsgroups: comp.databases Subject: Re: 5GLs, as defined in Jessica Keyes' article Message-ID: Date: 2 Jul 90 13:11:14 GMT References: <3006.268b14c6@mccall.com> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Lines: 21 Terry Poot says: > Is it just me, or does anyone thing that the term 4GL has been hihacked by > the DBMS industry? No, its not just you. The historical fact is that most "more advanced than 3GLs" have been authored by Data Base vendors. The driving force for this was that the data base system (relational or otherwise) was the only com- ponent that had a decent representation of the application's data and therefore, was in a position to relieve the programmer of the drudgery of traversing the data base, changing data representation, and formatting output. However, there is no reason that a 4GL MUST be developed by a DB vendor and, more importantly, it does not follow that all software developed by DB vendors are, a priori, 4GLs. --- James Troester Transarc Corp. troester@transarc.com 707 Grant Street Pittsburgh, PA 15219 All opinions are mine and not Transarc's.