>
> Date:    Sat, 11 Jul 2015 11:16:55 -0400
> From:    Tom Lang <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Wikipedia TurboImage article

>
> Computer Languages have been written about by such illustrious
> individuals as Donald Knuth, Noam Chomsky, Edser Dijkstra, and many,
> many others.
> http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/cl.html
> http://www.chomsky.info/
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra
>
> None of the above mention '4GL' anywhere in their writings.
>

Well, the KJV of the bible does not mention computer either. 
None-the-less they seem to be.

> My problem with so-called Fourth Generation Languages is the use of
> the term 'Language' attached to a commercial product.
>

Given that criteria then HP's own COBOL II would not be a computer
language either. Nor for that matter would SPL.  Nor Visual Cobol. 
Nor Microsoft dot Net.  Nor Java.  It seems that applying that one
criterion would exclude a large body of work that the rest of the
world seems quite comfortable with treating as computer languages.


>
> I therefore maintain the view that creating a textual interface;
> submitting that to an Interpreter; then submitting the result to a
> compiler is not a 'fourth generation language'.
>
.  .  .
> HP's Job Control LANGUAGE (JCL) is a means of interacting with the
> Command Interpreter (CI). It is highly sophisticated and has evolved
> over many years, but it is not considered as a Language - just a means
> to an end. It is the language of communicating with the O/S.

MPE/iX's JCL / CI is most certainly a computer programming language by
any reasonable definition.  I have written many complicated scripts in
the CI which are used to control job submissions and user environments
on the HP3000 that could be implemented in Perl or Ruby with no better
results.

http://www.robelle.com/ftp/papers/progci.txt

Every computer programming language is just a means to an end: to get
something useful done with a pile of silicon, copper, steel, glass and
traces of god-knows-what-else without taking all day to figure out how
every time something needs doing.

Arguments about what to call PowerHouse or Speedware products are
pointless. If not 4GL then what?  For transaction processing with a
DBMS back-end both families are certainly head and shoulders more
efficient with a programmer's time than COBOL, Fortran, Algol, APL,
BASIC, C++, Java, Ruby, Perl, PHP, and whatever else the cat has
coughed up this week, can ever hope to be.  Whatever else PH or SW
might be I would not lump either in with that pile of worms.

So 4GL is marketing-speak;  sort of like G3, G4 and G5 cell networks. 
Each is whatever the person presently talking about it says it is.  Of
course, in a similar vein now in English we have a word proactive -
whatever that means; prophylactic perhaps?

Methinks this is what is happening here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_without_a_difference


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