ABAP Archaeology

I love monkeying around with ABAP and creating non-programming artifacts. (Longtime readers have scrolled past three separate ABAP poetry posts!) I got curious and had some AI agents do a little spelunking for me, trying to find some super old ABAP programs - and came across something I love even more: the COMPUTE keyword. The documentation says: “The keyword COMPUTE is a relic”. Perfect!

The documentation is a bit hard to parse, because it reads like “every time you could use COMPUTE, just don’t do it and you’ll get the same result”, and then goes on to list specific instances where COMPUTE will work like an up/down cast of objects or assignment of data objects. But again, if you leave off COMPUTE you’ll get the same result. So it’s truly a relic of a past world that needed it.

I love the prosaic nature of ABAP, which makes reading ABAP a uniquely literary exercise, but this keyword produces a funny mental stutter for me. The docs say “the keyword COMPUTE does not produce a calculation”. But…what else do programs do?

In the year 3247, ABAP-bots F243-Prime and B783-Theta will uncover disk drives that contain COMPUTE statements. They’ll shake their cyber-heads and hyper-laugh at the folly of 20th century meatbag programmers. PM