Editing ABAP (section)

===ABAP statements===
In contrast with languages like C/C++ or Java, which define a limited set of language-specific statements and provide most functionality via libraries, ABAP contains an extensive amount of built-in statements. These statements traditionally used sentence-like structures and avoided symbols, making ABAP programs relatively verbose. However, in more recent versions of the ABAP language, a terser style is possible.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://help.sap.com/abapdocu_740/en/abenmesh_for_abexa.htm |title=Example of an ABAP program with many expressions |access-date=2015-06-19 |archive-date=2015-06-19 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150619113952/http://help.sap.com/abapdocu_740/en/abenmesh_for_abexa.htm |url-status=live}}</ref>

An example of statement based syntax (whose syntax originates in COBOL) versus expression-based syntax (as in C/Java):
<syntaxhighlight lang=abap>
ADD TAX TO PRICE.
* is equivalent to
PRICE = PRICE + TAX .
</syntaxhighlight>