A third-generation language (3GL) is a programming language designed to be easier

for a human to understand, including things like named variables, abstract data types, and
algebraic expression syntax. Another crucial difference compared to second-generation
programming languages was abstraction away from the underlying processor. A fragment
might be:

let b = c + 2 * d

First introduced in the late 1950s, Fortran, ALGOL and COBOL are early examples of
this sort of language. Most "modern" languages (BASIC, C, C++, Delphi, and Java) are
also third-generation languages. Most 3GLs support structured programming

1. The first generation languages, or 1GL, are low-level languages that are
machine language.
2. The second generation languages, or 2GL, are also low-level languages
that generally consist of assembly languages.
3. The third generation languages, or 3GL, are high-level languages such as
C.
4. The fourth generation languages, or 4GL, are languages that consist of
statements similar to statements in a human language. Fourth
generation languages are commonly used in database programming and
scripts.
5. The fifth generation languages, or 5GL, are programming languages that
contain visual tools to help develop a program. A good example of a fifth
generation language is Visual Basic.

A type of advanced computer programming language that isn't limited by the

type of computer or for one specific job and is more easily understood. Today,
there are dozens of high-level languages; some commonly used high-level
languages are BASIC, C, FORTAN and Pascal.
Structured programming can be seen as a subset or subdiscipline of procedural
programming, one of the major programming paradigms. It is most famous for removing
or reducing reliance on the GOTO statement.

Historically, several different structuring techniques or methodologies have been

developed for writing structured programs. The most common are:Dijkstra's structured
programming, where the logic of a program is a structure composed of similar sub-
structures in a limited number of ways. This reduces understanding a program to
understanding each structure on its own, and in relation to that containing it, a useful
separation of concerns.

A view derived from Dijkstra's which also advocates splitting programs into sub-sections
with a single point of entry, but is strongly opposed to the concept of a single point of
exit.

Data Structured Programming, which is based on aligning data structures with program
structures. This approach applied the fundamental structures proposed by Dijkstra, but as
constructs that used the high-level structure of a program to be modeled on the
underlying data structures being processed. There are at least 3 major approaches to data
structured program design proposed by Jean-Dominique Warnier, Michael A. Jackson,
and Ken Orr.

The two latter meanings for the term "structured programming" are more common, and
that is what this article will discuss. Years after Dijkstra (1969), object-oriented
programming (OOP) was developed to handle very large or complex programs (see
below: Object-oriented comparison).
Low-level structure
At a low level, structured programs are often composed of simple, hierarchical program
flow structures. These are concatenation, selection, and repetition:

• "Concatenatio
n" refers to a
sequence of
statements executed
in order.

• In "selection"
one of a number of
statements is
executed depending
on the state of the
program. This is
usually expressed
with keywords such
as
if..then..else..e
ndif, switch, or
case.

• In "repetition"
a statement is
executed until the
program reaches a
certain state or
operations are
applied to every
element of a
collection. This is
usually expressed
with keywords such
as while, repeat,
for or do..until.
Often it is
recommended that
each loop should
only have one entry
point (and in the
original structural
programming, also
 only one exit point),
and a few languages
enforce this.

Some languages, such as Dijkstra's original Guarded Command Language, emphasise the
unity of these structures with a syntax which completely encloses the structure, as in
if..fi. In others, such as C, this is not the case, which increases the risk of
misunderstanding and incorrect modification.

A language is described as "block-structured" when it has a syntax for enclosing

structures between bracketed keywords, such as an if-statement bracketed by if..fi, or
a code section bracketed by BEGIN..END, as in PL/I. However, a language is described as
"comb-structured" when it has a syntax for enclosing structures within an ordered series
of keywords. A "comb-structured" language has multiple structure keywords to define
separate sections within a block, analogous to the multiple teeth or prongs in a comb
separating sections of the comb. For example, in Ada, a block is a 4-pronged comb with
keywords DECLARE, BEGIN, EXCEPTION, END, and the if-statement in Ada is a 4-pronged
comb with keywords IF, THEN, ELSE, END IF.

[edit] Design
Structured programming is often (but not always) associated with a "top-down" approach
to design.

[edit] Structured programming languages

It is possible to do structured programming in any programming language, though it is
preferable to use something like a procedural programming language. Since about 1970
when structured programming began to gain popularity as a technique, most new
procedural programming languages have included features to encourage structured
programming (and sometimes have left out features that would make unstructured
programming easy). Some of the better known structured programming languages are
Pascal, PL/I and Ada.

[edit] History
[edit] Theoretical foundation

The structured program theorem provides the theoretical basis of structured

programming. It states that three ways of combining programs—sequencing, selection,
and iteration—are sufficient to express any computable function. This observation did not
originate with the structured programming movement; these structures are sufficient to
describe the instruction cycle of a central processing unit, as well as the operation of a
Turing machine. Therefore a processor is always executing a "structured program" in this
sense, even if the instructions it reads from memory are not part of a structured program.
However, authors usually credit the result to a 1966 paper by Böhm and Jacopini,
possibly because Dijkstra cited this paper himself. The structured program theorem does
not address how to write and analyze a usefully structured program. These issues were
addressed during the late 1960s and early 1970s, with major contributions by Dijkstra,
Robert W. Floyd, Tony Hoare, and David Gries.

[edit] Debate

P. J. Plauger, an early adopter of structured programming, described his reaction to the

structured program theorem:

Us converts waved this interesting bit of news under the noses of the
unreconstructed assembly-language programmers who kept trotting forth twisty
bits of logic and saying, 'I betcha can't structure this.' Neither the proof by Böhm
and Jacopini nor our repeated successes at writing structured code brought them
around one day sooner than they were ready to convince themselves.

In 1967 a letter from Dijkstra appeared in Communications of the ACM with the heading
"Go to statement considered harmful." The letter, which cited the Böhm and Jacopini
proof, called for the abolishment of GOTO from high-level languages in the interest of
improving code quality. This letter is usually cited as the beginning of the structured
programming debate.

Although, as Plauger mentioned, many programmers unfamiliar with the theorem

doubted its claims, the more significant dispute in the ensuing years was whether
structured programming could actually improve software's clarity, quality, and
development time enough to justify training programmers in it. Dijkstra claimed that
limiting the number of structures would help to focus a programmer's thinking, and
would simplify the task of ensuring the program's correctness by dividing analysis into
manageable steps. In his 1969 Notes on Structured Programming, Dijkstra wrote:

When we now take the position that it is not only the programmer's task to
produce a correct program but also to demonstrate its correctness in a
convincing manner, then the above remarks have a profound influence on the
programmer's activity: the object he has to produce must be usefully structured.
…In what follows it will become apparent that program correctness is not my
only concern, program adaptability or manageability will be another… 1

Donald Knuth accepted the principle that programs must be written with provability in
mind, but he disagreed (and still disagrees[citation needed]) with abolishing the GOTO
statement. In his 1974 paper, "Structured Programming with Goto Statements", he gave
examples where he believed that a direct jump leads to clearer and more efficient code
without sacrificing provability. Knuth proposed a looser structural constraint: It should be
possible to draw a program's flow chart with all forward branches on the left, all
backward branches on the right, and no branches crossing each other. Many of those
knowledgeable in compilers and graph theory have advocated allowing only reducible
flow graphs.

Structured programming theorists gained a major ally in the 1970s after IBM researcher
Harlan Mills applied his interpretation of structured programming theory to the
development of an indexing system for the New York Times research file. The project was
a great engineering success, and managers at other companies cited it in support of
adopting structured programming, although Dijkstra criticized the ways that Mills's
interpretation differed from the published work.

As late as 1987 it was still possible to raise the question of structured programming in a
computer science journal. Frank Rubin did so in that year with a letter, "'GOTO
considered harmful' considered harmful." Numerous objections followed, including a
response from Dijkstra that sharply criticized both Rubin and the concessions other
writers made when responding to him.

[edit] Outcome

By the end of the 20th century nearly all computer scientists were convinced that it is
useful to learn and apply the concepts of structured programming. High-level
programming languages that originally lacked programming structures, such as
FORTRAN, COBOL, and BASIC, now have them.

As a programmer gains experience, he or she may find it easier to understand certain

violations of the strict structured programming idea, and several programming languages
in widespread use provide restricted jump statements and exception handling for use in
these situations. The major industry languages (with the major exception of Java) also
retain the GOTO statement for jumps within a procedure, and it remains widely used.
Although Dijkstra succeeded in making structured programming the educational
standard, he did not succeed in making it a strict requirement.

[edit] Common deviations

[edit] Exception handling

Although there is almost never a reason to have multiple points of entry to a subprogram,
multiple exits are often used to reflect that a subprogram may have no more work to do,
or may have encountered circumstances that prevent it from continuing.

A typical example of a simple procedure would be reading data from a file and
processing it:

open file;
while (reading not finished) {
read some data;
if (error) {
 stop the subprogram and inform rest of the program about the error;
}
}
process read data;
finish the subprogram;

The "stop and inform" may be achieved by throwing an exception, second return from the
procedure, labelled loop break, or even a goto. As the procedure has 2 exit points, it
breaks the rules of Dijkstra's structured programming. Coding it in accordance with
single point of exit rule would be very cumbersome. If there were more possible error
conditions, with different cleanup rules, single exit point procedure would be extremely
hard to read and understand, very likely even more so than an unstructured one with
control handled by goto statements. On the other hand, structural programming without
such a rule would result in very clean and readable code.

Most languages have adopted the multiple points of exit form of structural programming.
C allows multiple paths to a structure's exit (such as "continue", "break", and "return"),
newer languages have also "labelled breaks" (similar to the former, but allowing breaking
out of more than just the innermost loop) and exceptions.

[edit] State machines

Some programs, particularly parsers and communications protocols, have a number of

states that follow each other in a way that is not easily reduced to the basic structures. It
is possible to structure these systems by making each state-change a separate subprogram
and using a variable to indicate the active state. However, some programmers (including
Knuth[citation needed]) prefer to implement the state-changes with a jump to the new state.

[edit] Object-oriented comparison

In the 1960s, language design was often based on textbook examples of programs, which
were generally small (due to the size of a textbook); however, when programs became
very large, the focus changed. In small programs, the most common statement is
generally the assignment statement; however, in large programs (over 10,000 lines), the
most common statement is typically the procedure-call to a subprogram. Ensuring
parameters are correctly passed to the correct subprogram becomes a major issue.

Many small programs can be handled by coding a hierarchy of structures; however, in

large programs, the organization is more a network of structures, and insistence on
hierarchical structuring for data and procedures can produce cumbersome code with large
amounts of "tramp data" to handle various options across the entire program. For
example a text-display program that allows dynamically changing the font-size of the
entire screen would be very cumbersome if coded by passing font-size data through a
hierarchy. Instead, a subsystem could be used to control the font data through a set of
accessor functions that set or retrieve data from a common area controlled by that font-
data subsystem. Databases are a common way around tramping.
The FORTRAN language has used labelled COMMON-blocks to separate global
program data into subsystems (no longer global) to allow program-wide, network-style
access to data, such as font-size, but only by specifying the particular COMMON-block
name. Confusion could occur in FORTRAN by coding alias names and changing data-
types when referencing the same labelled COMMON-block yet mapping alternate
variables to overlay the same area of memory. Regardless, the labelled-COMMON
concept was very valuable in organizing massive software systems and lead to the use of
object-oriented programming to define subsystems of centralized data controlled by
accessor functions. Changing data into other data-types was performed by explicitly
converting, or casting, data from the original variables.

Global subprogram names were recognized as just as dangerous (or even more
dangerous) than global variables or blank COMMON, and subsystems were limited to
isolated groups of subprogram names, such as naming with unique prefixes or using Java
package names.

Although structuring a program into a hierarchy might help to clarify some types of
software, even for some special types of large programs, a small change, such as
requesting a user-chosen new option (text font-color) could cause a massive ripple-effect
with changing multiple subprograms to propagate the new data into the program's
hierarchy. The object-oriented approach is allegedly more flexible, by separating a
program into a network of subsystems, with each controlling their own data, algorithms,
or devices across the entire program, but only accessible by first specifying named access
to the subsystem object-class, not just by accidentally coding a similar global variable
name. Rather than relying on a structured-programming hierarchy chart, object-oriented
programming needs a call-reference index to trace which subsystems or classes are
accessed from other locations.

Modern structured systems have tended away from deep hierarchies found in the 1970s
and tend toward "event driven" architectures, where various procedural events are
designed as relatively independent tasks.

Structured programming, as a forerunner to object-oriented programming, noted some

crucial issues, such as emphasizing the need for a single exit-point in some types of
applications, as in a long-running program with a procedure that allocates memory and
should deallocate that memory before exiting and returning to the calling procedure.
Memory leaks that cause a program to consume vast amounts of memory could be traced
to a failure to observe a single exit-point in a subprogram needing memory deallocation.

Similarly, structured programming, in warning of the rampant use of goto-statements, led

to a recognition of top-down discipline in branching, typified by Ada's GOTO that cannot
branch to a statement-label inside another code block. However, "GOTO WrapUp"
became a balanced approach to handling a severe anomaly without losing control of the
major exit-point to ensure wrap-up (for deallocating memory, deleting temporary files,
and such), when a severe issue interrupts complex, multi-level processing and wrap-up
code must be performed before exiting.
The various concepts behind structured programming can help to understand the many
facets of object-oriented programming.

3rd Generation Language

What is wrong with traditional programming languages for developing
Database systems ?

Unfortunately, the power and complexity of a general purpose programming language is

a major drawback when it comes to most database developments; it provides the
developer with too many opportunities for mistakes.

Lets presume a developer is writing some instructions to copy data from the user's screen
back into the database. Hopefully, they will be validating this data and using the correct
'data type' (e.g. date, string or number), but perhaps not, as it depends on the skill and
experience of the developer.

Suppose they use the wrong data type, a string instead of a number. The program may
still work most of the time until, some months later when the application fails and the
inevitable bug is reported!

It is better to reduce the amount of such coding to an absolute minimum by using a

Relational Interface Management System (RIMS) which can control and advise on
appropriate values for such validation.

Fourth generation language

Search

<language> (4GL, or "report generator language") An "application specific" language,

one with built-in knowledge of an application domain, in the way that SQL has built-in
knowledge of the realtional database domain.

The term was invented by Jim Martin to refer to non-procedural {high level languages}
built around database systems.
Fourth generation languages are close to natural language and were built with the concept
that certain applications could be generalised by adding limited programming ability to
them.

When given a description of the data format and the report to generate, a 4GL system
produces COBOL (or other 3GL) code, that actually reads and processes the data and
formats the results.

Some examples of 4GL are: database query language e.g.SQL; Focus, Metafont,
PostScript, S, IDL-PV, WAVE, Gauss, Mathematica, and data-stream languages such as
AVS, APE, Iris Explorer

Database
Search

1. <database> One or more large structured sets of persistent data, usually associated with
software to update and query the data.

A simple database might be a single file containing many records, each of which contains
the same set of fields where each field is a certain fixed width.

A database is one component of a database management system.

See also ANSI/SPARC Architecture, atomic, blob, data definition language, deductive
database, distributed database, fourth generation language, functional database, object-
oriented database, relational database.

Carol E. Brown's tutorial (http://www2.bus.orst.edu/faculty/brownc/lectures/db_tutor/).

2. <hypertext> A collection of nodes managed and stored in one place and all accessible
via the same server.

Links outside this are "external", and those inside are "internal".

On the World-Wide Web this is called a web site.

3. All the facts and rules comprising a logic programming program.

Screenwrite
Search

<language> A columnar format third generation programming language similar in layout

to assembler and used for transaction processing, solely on the Honeywell {Bull} TPS6
database/transaction management system on their Level 6 DPS6 minicomputers running
under the GCOS6 operating system.

In the UK it was mainly used by local authorities and the Ministry of Defense.

Being proprietary technology, its popularity waned with the introduction of open systems
standards, relational databases and fourth generation languages but it is believed that
some systems made it through Y2K.

[Dates?]

SQR
Search

<database, language> A fourth generation language for the creation of reports from
databases.

SQR is interpreted to dynamically generate SQL queries and format the results.

Originally a Sybase product, it was then sold to MITI, who subsequently changed their
name to SQRIBE.

SQR Server supports native database access for all major DBMSs and the use of platform
independent Java code.
3GL Tools
-- 91 Vendor ReportsALSO CALLED: Third Generation Language Tools
DEFINITION: Software development tools used specifically for third-generation languages, such as FORTRAN,
COBOL, BASIC, Pascal and C.
RECENT VENDOR REPORTS ON 3GL TOOLS
Your request for 3GL Tools resources returned limited or no results. The request has been
expanded to include Software Development Tools resources.

3GL　【Third-generation programming language】

3GL is an abbreviation for third generation language. Third-generation programming
languages are developed to instruct computers easily than second or first generation
languages. Third-generation languages are higher level languages than machine or
assembly languages.

Most 3GLs support structured programming. Some of the examples of third generation
programming languages are FORTAN, ALGOL, BASIC, C, etc.

programming language
Programming language is the language to write source code, which is a plan of soft ware.
Programming language is made from English and other languages so we can understand,
therefore, computers can not execute the programming language straightaway. To make a
computer execute the source code written in programming language, you have to
assemble or compile, and translate the programming language into machine language
(object code). By translating the source code into those languages simultaneously as
executing, it looks as though they are executing the source code itself. Those computers
are called ‘interpreter type.’
These days, what is called ‘script language’ is getting popular. It is simplified
programming language which has slower processing speed but can easily write small
scale program.

Programming languages have several categories according to the level for human being
to understand, such as assembly language, advanced language, and fourth generation
language. The more difficult the language is, the closer it is to machine language, and
more directly it can control computers. The language close to the human being’s natural
language is called ‘high level language’ and the language close to machine language is
called ‘low level language’