These days, I’m working in a reimplementation of a full health systems, originally written in the venerable programming language Clipper. It’s a big project, with many use cases, including administration, pharmacy, stock, diets, health management.
I met DBase II at early 80s. It ran in many operating systems, as an interpreter. At late 80s, I met Clipper from Nantucket, for DOS. Some of you remember Fox, adquired by Microsoft years later.
I found some info about Clipper. Those interested in the language, can visit:
CA-Clipper 5.3 . Guide To CA-Clipper – Menu
Clipper (programming language) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Code examples at:
The Oasis Clipper Source. Over 300,000,000,000 bytes served!
Frequent asked questions about Clipper and related stuff:
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ 2.31) about CA-Clipper and CA-Visual Objects
One of the member of the development team, commented that while Clipper was from Nantucket, it kept updated, but when it was bought by Computer Associates, it entered in a shadow, full of pitfalls, so it was surpassed by other options.
If you still have Fox, Clipper, DBase files in your disk, you can check the products from:
CodeBase Products Overview
It seems an interesting open source project, with SQL Server support, running in many plataforms, implementing a Clipper to C compiler:
Harbour Project
As language, Clipper had its quirks, as:
– The use/abuse of SET, as in SET EXACT OFF, SET EXACT ON, that modifies the behaviour of the application
– The concept of work areas
– Thinks like MEMVARS, that I still to understand)
I’m having fun, writing an interpreter, AjClipper in C#:
I have two simple programs running using my interpreter:
y
? "This is a test"
foo := "Hello"
bar := "World"
? foo, " ", bar
You can run them using
AjClipper.Console HelloWorld.prg SimpleTest.prg
It’s not a “killer application”, but it´s taking form. You can see my advances in my AjCodeKatas trunk:
http://code.google.com/p/ajcodekatas/source/browse/#svn/trunk/AjClipper
Están escritos los tests (dando verde, por ahora):
Good Code Coverage:
I´m adding any interesting link about Clipper under http://delicious.com/ajlopez/clipper
I could write an interpreter for Visual Fox dialect? I should study http://delicious.com/ajlopez/visualfox 🙂
Angel “Java” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com/en
http://twitter.com/ajlopez