One of the better 4GLs I worked with was IDEAL from ADR, later CA and Broadcom.
It had FOR ENDFOR SELECT IF THEN ELSE LOOP ENDLOOP and GOTOless... It fitted very nicely with James Martin and Michael Jackson (MJSL) programming and design methodologies. Other awful 4GLs, Natural (ADABAS). I remember working on a system in 1982 trying to write decent Natural code, it had memory limits that meant that lines of code had to crammed together which rendered unreadable and the BASIC like syntax whereby line numbers were referenced and if a statement was renumbered, references to previous I/O statements would fail. On Sat, Jan 8, 2022 at 8:33 AM Seymour J Metz <[email protected]> wrote: > I believe that reall AI will eventually arrive, and there has certainly > been progress, but I no longer believe in the fairy tale that it is only 5 > years away. I wish that here was a likeklihood that we would address the > ethical issues before then, but I doubt it. > > > -- > Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz > http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 > > ________________________________________ > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf > of Bob Bridges [[email protected]] > Sent: Friday, January 7, 2022 4:24 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: ... Re: Top 8 Reasons for using Python instead of REXX for > z/OS > > I agree with Shmuel; we heard a lot about 4GLs back in the '80s and '90s, > but I never saw one that lived up to the claims. DYL-280II, for example, > was advertised as a 4GL, but it wasn't close. Don't get me wrong, as a 3GL > I liked it just fine, and my company had me teach it to end users so they > could fetch data from their particular databases without throwing off > developers' estimated completion dates -- very successfully, I add happily. > But it was no 4GL. > > Actually I lump 4GLs and AI into the same bucket. They're related, I > think: > Folks dream of getting computers to think and talk like a human, but so far > it hasn't happened and I suspect it cannot happen. But then as a Christian > I'm also a mystic, by which I mean that the 37 cents' worth of chemicals > that one often hears about are not what we are, only what we're made of, > and > that the scientists' attempts to figure out what consciousness is and why > it > evolved is doomed to failure because they're starting with the wrong > postulates. But, heck, I may be mistaken. Maybe someday a computer will > pass a really decent Turing test. > > I'm not concerned that my profession is about to wither away, though. > > --- > Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313 > > /* Woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with > nonconformity. -Eric Hoffer */ > > -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf > Of > Seymour J Metz > Sent: Friday, January 7, 2022 16:09 > > I know of languages that have been peddled as human oriented or English > like; I don't know of any that even come close. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > -- Wayne V. Bickerdike ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
