OpenEdge provides a special purpose programming language for building business applications. In the documentation, the formal name for this language is ABL (Advanced Business Language). With few exceptions, all keywords of the language appear in all UPPERCASE, using a font that is appropriate to the context. All other alphabetic language content appears in mixed case.

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ABL is both a compiled and an interpreted language that executes in a run-time engine. The documentation refers to this run-time engine as the ABL Virtual Machine (AVM). When the documentation refers to ABL source code compilation, it specifies ABL or the compiler as the actor that manages compile-time features of the language. When the documentation refers to run-time behavior in an executing ABL program, it specifies the AVM as the actor that manages the specified run-time behavior in the program.

For example, these sentences refer to the ABL compiler’s allowance for parameter passing and the AVM’s possible response to that parameter passing at run time: “ABL allows you to pass a dynamic temp-table handle as a static temp-table parameter of a method. However, if at run time the passed dynamic temp-table schema does not match the schema of the static temp-table parameter, the AVM raises an error.” The following sentence refers to run-time actions that the AVM can perform using a particular ABL feature: “The ABL socket object handle allows the AVM to connect with other ABL and non-ABL sessions using TCP/IP sockets.”