ABAP is a programming language developed by SAP for programming business applications in the SAP environment.

Previously only procedural, ABAP is now also an object-oriented language thanks to the ABAP Objects enhancement.

When looping over internal tables, it is generally preferable to ASSIGN to a field symbol rather than loop INTO a work area. Assigning field symbols simply updates their reference to point to the next line of the internal table during each iteration, whereas using INTO results in the line of the table being copied into the work area, which can be expensive for long/wide tables.

The maximum length of a message, including parameters passed to it using &, is 72 characters.