Re: 4GL vs. ESQL/C

"Carl Y. Wu" wrote: > > We are making a decision of whether to move our applications towards ESQL/C > (from 4GL) > My company is an ISP and our billing system is running on IDS 7.3. > The majarity of the billing system is written in 4GL, we use RDS version of > 4GL in both development and production. > Two server programs which deal with customer signing up from the web use > TCP/IP sockets so they are written in C, and use the argument stack to call > 4GL functions to do database access. > We are rewriting some components of the application system and some people > sugguest that we should move to ESQL/C and here are some of their arguments: > 1. ESQL/C is more portable, 4GL is not portable at all. Well, anyone can make a mistake. You're using RDS!, So you don't even have to recompile! > 2. The sign up server programs should be rewrtten in ESQL/C rather than half > in C and half in 4GL. because the push and pops on the argument stack are > "ugly". That sounds like a sound idea. Why was it half and half in the first place? > 3. C is a "more beautiful language" than 4GL. I refer you to my answer to 1. > To me it's certainly staying with 4GL. Move towards ESQL/C just for two > signup server programs' sake doesn't make sense to me. Well you certainly don't need to rewrite an entire application for two programs, no. If they really need C, then rewrite them in ESQL/C as you propose. > Can you kindly give your opinions on which development tool you would > choose, or point to other information source of guidelines on choosing the > right tool for applications? If you were choosing dev tools for a new app, then there is a large list. But it seems you wish to make a couple of programs more elegant, nay, beautiful. So I'd stick with the more beautiful language, 4GL. Just use C when you need something 4GL cannot do. Though for database access, I can't imagine what that might be. ;-) Cheers, -- Mark. +----------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | Mark D. Stock mailto:mdstock@mydas.freeserve.co.uk |//////// /| | http://www.informix.com http://www.informixhandbook.com |///// / //| | http://www.iiug.org +-----------------------------------+//// / ///| | |This email will self-destruct in |/// / ////| | |10 sec. If you received this email |// / /////| | |in error, sorry about the mess. |/ ////////| +----------------------+-----------------------------------+-----------+