Hello! i’m new to the software ag world and i have a couple of questions:
1) Are there alternatives to the development enviroment under unix? can i use emacs to edit my natural programs?
2) the programs are stored on the database or as text files elsewhere?
3) Can i acces the adabase data from my c / cpp / other language program?
4) Can you point me to some source of free documentation relating the development procces / tools / related knowledge to start up ?
Thank you very much! 
Thank you for your advise, and talking about perceptions, let me give you a friendly admonish too… maybe someone around here could think that you are a pedant don’t letting pass such a little mistake… One funny thing is that the spell checker on this forum do not recognise the word ADABAS!
Ok, maybe my question should had been HOW can i access my ADABAS data from a c/cpp program. 
Thank you!
PS: http://www.webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?sourceid=Mozilla-search&va=pedant
Etymology: Middle French, from Italian pedante
b : one who is unimaginative or who unduly emphasizes minutiae in the presentation or use of knowledge c : a formalist or precisionist in teaching
Point taken and understood.
However, I wanted to make you aware that there are those out there that make assumptions about those who spell it with the “e”. If you look at the SAG-L archives, this has happened before, and some of the comments are not nice.
Kind regards,
Ray
To be honest: I didn’t recognise the typo in your original post. I read over it…
But If you’re interested in Etymology of ADABAS: It’s an acronym. The following link shows to possible meanings, but I guess only the first one is correct.
I read on SAG-L a post that said that ADABAS had the meaning of “Adaptable Database”, but the post said that it was the meaning at the beginning and that it has been deprecated or something like that…
Now that we are getting so "strict" on the language subject, I'am a little afraid of posting messages to this forum, given that my mother thong is spanish and i usually don't have much chances to practice my english... I hope you'll forgive my mistakes, please :)
Ok, I really need to know how can I access my ADABAS data from a gcc compiled program, are there any libraries i can link my program with to access ADABAS? or any kind of protocol i can use to connect to it?
Is there information about this subject on the documentation site of software AG? Why isn’t there any information related to the older versions of the software? Have Software-AG forget about the existence of previous versions?
As a little bottom-line, I'am very surprised about the lack of diffusion of such a quality product, you can find pages, blogs, communities and a lot of information about MSSQL Server, Oracle, DB2, etc... Why isn't this the case with ADABAS?
Also, i know you can became very, very proficient with development enviroments like the one supplied with ADABAS and Natural, but it's a little annoying to me having to use such and old interface paradigm.... i would like better to use emacs or even vi to edit my programs, and not the editor supplied with the Software-AG package! If there was some way to interface the ADABAS system, I would be very happy to begin myself a project to develop some kind of open-source editor!!! Is that a too-ambicious goal to fulfill (specially being the case that there haven't been a project like that on all the years of living of ADABAS)
Thank you for reading this long post
You’ll find examples + Makefile in
$ADADIR$ADAVERS\Examples\Client
Hola,
Yes, of course it is possible under unix to use any editor which is able to edit ascii-files. The Natural-sources are line-based. a problem might be to edit data-areas (because they are in a fixed-column format) and maps (they have a lot of cryptic information for the map-editor). You have to know, what you are doing if you want to edit this kind of natural-“objects”.
You have to use ftouch, if you create new objects, because natural has “it’s own” directory of the sources (FileName FILEDIR.SAG).
you are right, imho it is not “state of the art” what software ag is giving to the unix-developers. but i assume, they have SPoD (Single point of development) and they will sell this add-on for the natural-developers.
As we started 5 years ago with natural on Unix (comming from IBM os/390), SPoD was not on the market and we decided to develop our own IDE, running on XP. This IDE handles Natural(-Sources), Shell-Scripts, Jobs, Files, documentation, templates etc. It has an build-in FTP- and TelNet-Client to communicate from XP with our Development-, Test- and Production-Servers.
Inside this IDE we use UltraEdit for editing of ALL Sources - not only Natural. UltraEdit offers syntax-coloring, auto-completion and much more. There is no need to develop a “new” Editor. UltraEdit is shareware.
salu2