Category:Clipper/XBase++: Difference between revisions

{{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.

The original writers of Clipper were Ashton-Tate employees that formed a company namenamed 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.

Later on, Nantucket was boughbought by Computer Associates who discontinued maintaining Clipper (last version was 5.3) in 1997.

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.

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.