Progress
Language Tutorial
for Windows


Basic 4GL Constructs and Conventions

This section provides a brief overview of basic Progress language constructs and conventions. This information is by no means a complete description of the Progress language, but it does provide a starting point from which you can expand your knowledge of the Progress 4GL. To start, let’s consider the following code:

DEFINE VARIABLE cnt AS INTEGER.
REPEAT cnt = 1 TO 15:
   DISPLAY "Welcome to Progress!" 
      WITH CENTERED.
END. 

This procedure contains the following Progress language constructs and elements:

Progress is a block-structured language—that is, you can group statements together into blocks. Procedures are the largest block structures in Progress. Later in the tutorial, you’ll learn about other types of blocks that can exist inside a procedure block.

A repeat block is similar to the repeat loop, which is found in many 3GLs) The following code fragment shows a repeat block:

Block structures within a procedure normally begin with a block-header statement and end with an END statement. You can use these block structures to apply processing services to a group of statements.

You will learn about more Progress language constructs and blocks as you proceed through this tutorial. To learn more about the syntax of the Progress language, see the Progress Language Reference or the Progress On-line Reference module in the Progress help system.


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