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{{language}}The Clipper Language was written originally to create executable .EXE files out of the code written for dBase III from Ashton-Tate, which was an interpretative language.
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The original writers of Clipper were Ashton-Tate employees that formed a company named Nantucket. The story goes, while sitting in a bar on the island of Nantucket, in MA, and looking at a painting of a Clipper Ship.
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Later on, Nantucket was bought by Computer Associates who discontinued maintaining Clipper (last version was 5.3) in 1997.
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I believe it was the most powerful relational database language of it's time and it is still in use by some large corporations because of it's simplicity and reliability. When the [[Windows]] world came into the scenery, several companies wrote languages that are near 100% compatible with Clipper. Two very well use are XBase++ and xHarbour.
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Before dBase came about, to find a record in a table you had to do a binary sort. One of the big features, among others, of dBase was that it could find one record out of a billion by doing only 3 comparisons (on a 4.7 MHz computer) that took less than one second using index files as reference. They also invented the DBF file structure which carries the structure of the table internally in record # 0, also known as the phantom or ghost record.
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[http://www.clippersolutions.com Clipper Solutions]
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[http://www.alaska-software.com Alaska Software]
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[http://www.xharbour.org xHarbour]
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[http://www.xailer.com Xailer]
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[http://www.donnay-software.com Donnay Software] |