Talk:LINC 4GL

"People from a different mainframe background will almost never develop a complete understanding of the intentions behind LINC." Sounds pretty POV-full to me... mshields 12/27/06.

Additional Strengths and Weaknesses
An important strength, not so far listed, is that a LINC generated system never "crashes". It may not do what you want but it always does something. This allows you to debug/refine your business or GUI logic without getting bogged down in algorithmic failures. This in turn strongly supports rapid prototyping with the end users well into the loop.

Another strength is that it hides the details of the database and the procedural language - in fact it hides the conventional separation between them. A 4GL programmer no more needs to know those things than a 3GL programmer needs to know machine code. Optimal modelling of the LINC virtual machine onto the various features of specific platforms is a matter for the product developers.

The biggest weakness (in my 10+ years of LINC experience) is the lack of direct support for a single business transaction spanning multiple screens. The standard solutions (cookies, session tables in the database, etc.) have to be defined by the programmer for each application, whereas 'session' should have been an intrinsic concept like components and events.

A naive LINC application will allow any event (transaction) to be entered at any time by any user. A mature LINC application requires programmer code in every ispec (transaction definition) to manage/validate this. Most programmers would begin by importing their screen navigation/session management code from a previous project.

Shannock9 (talk) 13:53, 6 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Generally I agree - although I have crashed a few in my time - but anything we know from experience is original research. You'd have to be able to source your comments. -- Ian Dalziel (talk) 14:42, 6 March 2010 (UTC)