Though used earlier in papers and discussions, the term 4GL was first used formally by
James Martin in his 1981 book
Application Development Without Programmers to refer to non-procedural, high-level
specification languages. In some primitive way, early 4GLs were included in the
Informatics MARK-IV (1967) product and
Sperry's
MAPPER (1969 internal use, 1979 release). The motivations for the '4GL' inception and continued interest are several. The term can apply to a large set of software products. It can also apply to an approach that looks for greater
semantic properties and implementation power. Just as the 3GL offered greater power to the programmer, so too did the 4GL open up the development environment to a wider population. The early input scheme for the 4GL supported entry of data within the 72-character limit of the
punched card (8 bytes used for sequencing) where a card's tag would identify the type or function. With judicious use of a few cards, the
4GL deck could offer a wide variety of processing and reporting capability whereas the equivalent functionality coded in a
3GL could subsume, perhaps, a whole box or more of
cards. The 72-character format
continued for a while as hardware progressed to larger memory and terminal interfaces. Even with its limitations, this approach supported highly sophisticated applications. As interfaces improved and allowed longer statement lengths and grammar-driven input handling, greater power ensued. An example of this is illustrated by Nicholas Rawlings in his comments for the Computer History Museum about NCSS. He reports that
James Martin asked Rawlings for a
NOMAD solution to a standard problem Martin called the ''Engineer's Problem'': "give 6% raises to engineers whose job ratings had an average of 7 or better." Martin provided a "dozen pages of COBOL, and then just a page or two of
Mark IV, from
Informatics." Rawlings offered a single statement, performing a set-at-a-time operation. The development of the 4GL was influenced by several factors, with the hardware and operating system constraints having a large weight. When the 4GL was first introduced, a disparate mix of hardware and operating systems mandated custom application development support that was specific to the system in order to ensure sales. One example is the
MAPPER system developed by
Sperry. Though it has roots back to the beginning, the system has proven successful in many applications and has been ported to modern platforms. The latest variant is embedded in the BIS offering of
Unisys.
MARK-IV is now known as VISION:BUILDER and is offered by
Computer Associates.
The Santa Fe railroad used
MAPPER to develop a system in a project that was an early example of 4GL,
rapid prototyping, and
programming by users. The idea was that it was easier to teach railroad experts to use
MAPPER than to teach programmers the "intricacies of railroad operations". One of the early (and portable) languages that had 4GL properties was
RAMIS developed by Gerald C. Cohen at
Mathematica, a mathematical software company. Cohen left Mathematica and founded Information Builders to create a similar reporting-oriented 4GL, called
FOCUS. Later 4GL types are tied to a database system and are far different from the earlier types in their use of techniques and resources that have resulted from the general improvement of computing with time. An interesting twist to the 4GL scene is realization that graphical interfaces and the
related reasoning done by the user form a 'language' that is poorly understood. ==Types==