ABAP 7.40SP5 has a whole lot of new ABAP language constructs which greatly help to keep the code compact and clean. Horst Keller from SAP has written a whole bunch of blog posts about the new features that are really worth the time to read.
I’d suggest to start with the first post in this list and then continue on down, each blog post will then go into detail on specific new features.
- http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/blog/2013/05/22/abap-news-for-release-740
- http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/blog/2013/06/26/abap-keyword-documentation-740
- http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/blog/2013/05/29/abap-news-for-release-740–table-expressions
- http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/blog/2013/05/27/abap-news-for-release-740–constructor-operators-conv-and-cast
- http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/blog/2013/05/23/abap-news-for-release-740–inline-declarations
- http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/blog/2013/06/22/abap-news-for-release-740–new-internal-table-functions
- http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/blog/2013/06/27/abap-news-for-release-740–internal-tables-with-empty-key
- http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/blog/2013/06/20/abap-news-for-release-740–abap-objects
- http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/blog/2013/07/04/abap-news-for-release-740–abap-and-json
- http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/blog/2014/02/06/abap-news-for-release-740-sp05