Talk:ABAP

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Rob Smeets, Belgium: The external link to ABAP on SAP's pages is not working... This is the correct URL: http://sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/developerareas/abap

Which one is it ?

"ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming)"
"ABAP is an abbreviation of Allgemeiner Berichtsaufbereitungsprozessor"
FiP 14:15, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

 The first one. It used to be the second one.
 —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 169.145.3.13 (talk • contribs).

Original name: "Allgemeiner Berichtsanalyseprozessor". For marketing purposes, it was changed to "Advanced Business Apllication Programming". So, concerning the initial name, it's an acronym, with its "internationalized" name it's a backronym. Now the funny part is the english translation of its initial name, which would be "Common Report Analysis Processor". Try to find an acronym for that ... -- C. Deelmann 08:50, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Nice innuendo and thanks for the info, but I'd suspect "Allgemeiner" is usually translated as "General", not "Common" ;) --92.108.210.53 (talk) 07:44, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Basis

It appears to be a virtual machine, why is not called as such in the article? Mathmo ^Talk 02:14, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Data integrity

The article includes a statement to the effect that the ABAP Dictionary enforces referential integrity. I believe it doesn't, so I'll change this in a while unless anyone objects. 86.31.158.130 19:05, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. The DDIC does not enforce integrity. You can declare it but this will not have an effect on SQL statements that interact with the database. There is no way of cascading deletes and inserts will not fail when they violate declared relationships. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.37.130.28 (talk) 21:32, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

SIze of article / origin of article

This is huge -- it seems more like a programming manual than an encyclopedia article. This also leads me to wonder where all this material came from -- is this definitely copyvio-free?--NapoliRoma 18:44, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

copyvio-free? Who knows? And since it's impossible to proof, who cares? If someone complains about something, we remove it, as usual. --Sigmundur (talk) 08:50, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

It's an obvious copy from SAP's help manual. Compare the section "Internal Tables as data types" with http://help.sap.com/saphelp_470/helpdata/EN/fc/eb35de358411d1829f0000e829fbfe/content.htm

I totally agree that the article is quite blown up with details. I started to remove some WelfVonBayern (talk) 07:15, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Article is definatedly too long, also it looks a bit overpostivie about ABAP. Why isn't there a criticism section (like in i.e. Java or C# articles)? There are several annoying featues of abap and none are mentioned(for. ex. the largest DB field is 64K (no BLOB nor anything))?. "It is a special strength of ABAP that you can define a great variety of data types and objects that span the spectrum from very elementary data types to very complex and dynamic types." - how is it a special strength? Cerainly not compared to general purpose languages like c/c++. It could be compared to PL/SQL, but the whole statement is unclear. The "advantages over contemporary languages" are also dubious - most of them are described in an insubstancial way. For example how is exception handling an advantage over Pascal/C++/C#/Java (it actually works the same way)? Again, maybe it's an advantage over some application-specyfic languages, but the title just says "over languages". Same thing: how is the concept of internal tables "unique" - how is it better than for example generic containers? All this looks as if SAP had some1 write a nice article about their product. Wheather it is so or not the article needs shortening, and is definatedly too one-sided. 79.184.126.8 (talk) 00:46, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

I haven't read the complete article and there are annying things about ABAP but ABAP does have BLOB and String types both on the database as well as during runtime. Exception handling is indeed pretty Java-like (probably derived from there). Itabs are certainly a somewhat specific notion, which of course doesn't mean that they are "better" than alternative construct. I don't know other languages that have a construct that can serve the purpose of DB result set, Hash table, Associative array and general collection, so this would justify to point this out as a characteristic trait of the language. I didnt write the original statements and I'm not not saying that Itabs are better than constructs of other languages but itabs seem like a (maybe somewhat quirky) speciality of ABAP. This is not a defense - just my 2 cents as somebody who is using the language but who is too lazy to revise the article. 91.37.130.28 (talk) 21:46, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Mind you, the article is also wrong in that it states that there is no such thing as an array in ABAP. An array - "work area" - is the basis for a table. The author must have been a novice programmer who had never defined an array directly or as a structure in the data dictionary. Furthermore, surely a "strength" of ABAP is its incorporation of openSQL, and thus its manipulation of mass data in general. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.255.97.205 (talk) 00:49, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

How about using fold-outs (or what are they called; that you can expand and contract; show and hide)? At least the examples and specific features could be hidden away. --Sigmundur (talk) 08:48, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Aspects to consider

I think this is something that is really too specific, and rather personal - perhaps one could say not a NPOV! Therefore, I've removed it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.227.12.124 (talk) 12:28, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Comparison of ABAP and Java

This article was proposed for deletion on the grounds of unfixable original research. I deprodded as it seemed to me that a comparison between the two was reasonable, but I don't know enough about computer programming to properly assess and fix the article. Any assessments of it and editing would be welcome. Fences&Windows 16:05, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Now at AfD. Fences&Windows 00:13, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

ABAP is a language only for SAP applications. It can not be used for other developements. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.166.1.187 (talk) 05:06, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

customer table updation

I want to make a customer table and how a customer table will autamatically updated —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.160.52.98 (talk) 09:03, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Delete sections

I'm working on a cleanup of the ABAP article (I'm not the original author but I had noticed that much of the original article was obsolete or contained questionable information). As part of that work I have marked following sections for deletion:

• Advanced topics: this section only mentions batch input. This is not a key topic in an article describing the language and I think it is best left out. Furthermore, if batch input is discussed then alternative techniques like CATT would also have to be mentioned, which would make the article even longer.
• Other features: contains simply a list of unrelated features, some of which are already mentioned earlier in their proper context
• Example and Example (Report): these are very long and, except for ABAP programmers, fairly meaningless examples. Anyone who wants to see a full ABAP program can find any number of examples on the Web. The short and documented examples earlier in the article are far more useful.

Mark Mergaerts --84.194.172.227 (talk) 14:13, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

copyvio

As suggested on this discussion page before, I think part of this page is copyright violation. I have added the teplate (I don't know if correctly). --90.180.143.210 (talk) 22:09, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Link: "ABAP History". SAP-technical.com - AVIRA Reports a script malware — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.248.123.186 (talk) 19:35, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

Instruction manual

Much of this article reads like an instruction manual and could use cleaning up, probably including removal of much of the material. The Syntax section in particular seems to be just a straightforward tutorial with no encyclopedic content at all. -- Fyrael (talk) 15:14, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

Odd assertion on language origins.

Can someone explain to me how the following can be true: "It is extracted from the base computing languages Java, C, C++ and Python."

Given that the language predates both Java and Python, in addition to having almost nothing in common with C and C++.