NATURAL
Natural - usually pronounced in English and in German-speaking countries - is a family of software development environments, Software AG for the creation of application programs. The first version of the first variant for mainframe (English: mainframe ) was developed in 1975 by Peter Pagé, composed by Margit Neumann. Natural enabled from the outset on mainframes one there initially rarely possible interactive operation (see literature). Natural supports, inter alia, a 4GL programming language called NPL (Natural Programming Language), which is confusingly itself often called Natural or NATURAL. Originally Natural for Mainframes IBM and Siemens has been developed but is now on many platforms. These and include a
- Z / OS
- OS/390
- BS2000/OSD
- VSE
- Z / VM
- AIX
- HP- UX
- SUN Solaris
- OpenSUSE
- Red Hat
- Windows 2000
- Windows XP Professional
- Windows Server 2003
In Natural can be accessed on a variety of data storage systems with both of them highly efficient proprietary access commands as well as through standard SQL. These are usually database management systems ( DBMS, English DBMS). The accesses are doing on native ( ie specific ) driver.
Natural supports include the following data management systems:
NPL source code is compiled in Natural intermediate code then by the Natural runtime environment - is interpreted - similar to the Java Virtual Machine.
With NPL, the first programming language for building commercial application systems has been offered for the term 4th generation was coined. NPL is as the programming language part of the comprehensive interactive development environment Natural. An essential feature of the languages of the 4th generation is the level of abstraction, in which the problem is formulated. Higher demand programming 3rd generation nor the programming of individual technical procedural steps, the requirement formulated rather problemnah languages in the 4th generation and brought the system in any environment using the technical possibilities of the implementation. Other features include: integrated design of the user interface, list generation, database access.
NPL code is very readable, as can normally be dispensed brackets. Small applications are realized very quickly due to the simple syntactic structure. Natural applications or applications in conjunction with Natural ADABAS are known to be extremely performant. One drawback, however, is that one for Natural significantly less exchange opportunities on the Internet is as popular in programming languages.
Example:
* Hello World in Natural WRITE ' Hello World!' END As part of the modernization of existing Natural applications from the mainframe era, there is the possibility to integrate them into an AJAX - surface with the help of 4 Natural Ajax and others.