ABAP_to_the_Future

It's a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words. Of course the great wastage
is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that
can be got rid of as well.
—George Orwell, 1984
2 New Language Features in ABAP 7.4
Back in the early eighties, when I was st ill a teenager, my parents bought me a
BBC Microcomputer to replace my ZX81. Even then, my primary interest was
programming as opposed to playing games, and what I liked most about my new
toy was the broad range of commands that were then available to me in the BBC’s
version of BASIC (for example, constructs such as REPEAT UNTIL ). Even now,
many years later, I look on with interest when something is added to the ABAP
language.
As time has gone by, more and more commands and constructs have been added
to ABAP—while nothing has been taken away, to ensure backward compatibility—and
the rate of change seems to be violently accelerating. A fair number of
changes came in as a result of the in troduction of SAP NetWeaver 7.02, which
this chapter will touch on, but this is nothing compared to the cascade of changes
that came with version 7.4. This proves beyond a doubt that ABAP is not a dead
language, which was a fear of many peop le in 2001, when there was talk (from
the very top of SAP) about replacing ABAP with Java.
The quote at the beginning of the chap ter from George Orwell’s novel 1984 is
about the destruction of words. The ch aracter working on the language “Newspeak”
says to the main character, Winston Smith, that the ruling party is hell-bent
on destroying existing words, as opposed to creating new ones. The idea of ABAP
7.4 is, in some ways, the same: Many of the 7.4 changes allow you to achieve the
exact same tasks as before, but with half the code or less. For example, in Newspeak
“that was wonderful, fantastic, th e best thing ever” becomes “++good.” In
ABAP, CONCATANATE ld_this ld_that INTO ld_the_other SEPARATED BY ‘_’
becomes ld_the_other = ld_this && ‘_’ && ld_that.
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