Comparison of Pascal and the dBASE III PLUS Language in Programming an Inventory Management System.

Before the widespread use of Database Management Systems DBMS, programmers have had to rely on the third generation language such as COBOL, Pascal, and PLI to implement their application programs. These programs are usually very hard to maintain and modify unless very disciplined structured programming techniques are used. However, with the DBMS, the ease of development, maintenance, and modification of data-managing application programs can be attained. In this thesis, we compare two versions of an inventory management program, one written in Apple Pascal and the other written in dBASE III PLUS, in terms of their modifiability and maintainability.