ABAP Overview The Advanced Business Application Programming / 4GL (ABAP/4, commonly referred to as ABAP) is SAP’s proprietary language. More than 80% of SAP R/3 is developed using ABAP. The ABAP Program code is “generated” into Byte-code at the time of Activation of the program and is processed by the ABAP Processor which is part of the Kernel and Basis Services (a set of core programs developed in C) at the time of execution. Any ABAP Program, because it requires the BASIS modules, can run only within an SAP environment. Many features of the programming language and ABAP editor environment resemble the COBOL / IBM Mainframe environment although much of it has been scaled down somewhat to give the language a modern look. The language is case-insensitive and each statement terminates with a period. ABAP programs are event-driven to an extent though the event handling capabilities are not similar to full-fledged object-oriented languages such as Java or even Visual Basic. ABAP ob...
