FOURTH GENERATION PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

•  A Fourth-Generation Programming Language(4GL) (1970s-1990)  is a programming language or programming environment designed with a specific purpose in mind, such as the development of commercial business software.

• All 4GLs are designed to reduce :

          -  programming effort,
          -  the time it takes to develop software and
          -  the cost of software development.

•  Table-driven (codeless) programming, usually running with runtime framework and libraries. Instead of using code.

•  Report generators 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.

•  Data management 4GLs such as SAS, SPSS and Stata provide sophisticated coding commands for data manipulation, file reshaping, case selection and data documentation in the preparation of data for statistical analysis and reporting.

      Some Fourth-Generation Languages :

          •  FoxPro
          •  PowerBuilder
          •  SQL
          •  Report Builder
          •  Oracle Reports
          •  Graph Talk
          •  MATLAB
          •  CSS

• Database query languages :

          -  Query languages are computer languages used to make queries into databases and information systems.
          -  Query languages can be classified according to whether they are database query languages or information retrieval query languages.
          -  SQL is a well known query language for relational databases.
          -  XQuery is a query language for XML data sources.