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Comparative analysis of dBase by students (abstract only)

Published: 01 February 1987 Publication History

Abstract

An initial offering of Comparative Programming Languages for advanced MIS students was accomplished in an elective seminar format in the spring quarter of 1986. Students used the text PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES - Design and Implementation by Terrence W. Pratt in the 1984 second edition from Prentice-Hall. Heavy emphasis was placed on learning to understand and apply comparative analysis to software tools in a broad sense not limited to third generation compiler environments. Small teams of students volunteered to present a class derived calendar of theory topics approximately correlated to the text with some extensions and modifications. Each topic presentation also included a review of how the topic applied to each of the eight languages in the text (FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/1, Pascal, Ada, APL, LISP, SNOBOL). Based on this preparation the class was to try its skills on analysing a software tool not mentioned in the text.
DBASE was selected for the final project study on several bases. A primary reason was its broad availability both on campus, at home, and in many of the employed students work environments. DBASE also represented a tool which had some easily accessible evolutionary history in the II, III and III-Plus variants. Discussions were available in the literature from many sources and points of view, while hands on experimentation was accessible for all three variants. DBASE contained the element of database orientation which went beyond the textbook as well. It could also be argued, as James Martin does in his fourth Generation Languages Volume I Principles, that it represents an early fourth generation tool with a significantly supportive user-application-developer interface. In spite of these concept stretching features it still has embedded within it a fairly conventional third generation language. Many of the students felt that knowledge of dBASE represented a saleable commodity in the current job market. For these reasons the class undertook an analysis of dBASE.
Each of the 21 students studied and made both oral and written presentations of dBASE from the perspective of their selected theory topic specialty, providing what the class considered full coverage. As promised, I edited their initial submission (100 plus pages) to a rough draft made available to class members the following quarter (38 double space pages). A more severe editing and rewriting of this interesting document to about a dozen pages is the proposed main content of this paper and presentation. The final results should approximately parallel and extend the style of presentation Pratt used in each of his eight language chapters. The major topics would be:
History and Commercialization
Data Types and Operators
Data Structures, Database and Operators
Variable Definition Mechanism and Scope Control
Sequence Control, Subprograms and Menus
Speed and Efficiency Issues
Naturalness, Writeability and Readability
dBASEII Richness Summary
II, III, and III PLUS Comparison

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSC '87: Proceedings of the 15th annual conference on Computer Science
February 1987
473 pages
ISBN:0897912187
DOI:10.1145/322917
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 01 February 1987

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