Question Files .P extension

[Andres Felipe Rodriguez]

Hello everyone in the forum!
First let me tell that im totally new to Progress and to this forum, and this post may be in the wrong place, so sorry for that.

This is my question/situation: Recently the company im working for is in the need to develop a new software to the call center department, the manager told me that he has an old software that have a lot of the functionalities we now need to develop, the source file of the old program are a lot of (.P) files extension, now i know this are Progress files and this are really old files, so
How can i compile this files?
Do i need to buy some progress product to do so?
What are these? (sorry, really new to progress)

Thank you so much if someone can help me with my problem.
I will upload one of the files in case someone need to take a look.

 

[TomBascom]

You at least need a 4gl compiler license.

You might benefit from some other licenses and products but the details depend a lot on your environment.

What version of Progress?

On what platform?

The "showcfg" command will reveal a lot of what we need to know to provide more detailed answers.

 

[zerovian]

The short answer is yes, you'll need a development license of some sort to perform the compile of the .p programs. You may already have one.

Second, check the https://community.progress.com website for documentation and getting started videos. You can d/l a free trial version of Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge from there as well which can give you a nice eclipse based environment for working with these.

.p, .w, and .i files are programs written in ABL The language itself is somewhat of a cross between Pascal, COBOL and Visual Basic with some special sauce that is almost entirely unlike SQL.

Watch some of the videos on the community sites to familiarize yourself with some of the concepts, especially database connectivity which you'll need to understand perform the compiles. There are also web based training courses available which cover a lot of topics.

 

[Andres Felipe Rodriguez]

Thank you much for your respond, i will be working on this now, will udate asap.

 

[Andres Felipe Rodriguez]

by the way, these are files coded in 1993 according to some emails from the developer, is it possible that this files are actually obsolete?

 

[RealHeavyDude]

As far as I know Progress has never removed any ABL ( it has been re-branded from 4GL to ABL some 10 years ago ) statement from the language. They have deprecated some things so that the compiler issues a warning but they are still correct syntax. Therefore any procedure that was coded with the first commercial release that Progress shipped ( around 1985 if I remember correctly ) should still compile fine. So, while the code's creation date may date back into the Stone Age ( IT wise ) it might still be very relevant and seamlessly used by a modern application. But usually code that old contains programming techniques which are considered obsolete or bad practice today - shared variable and include files to name just a few.

Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.