Clipper (programming language)

Clipper was created by Nantucket Corporation, a company that was started in 1984 by Barry ReBell (management) and Brian Russell (technical). Larry Heimendinger was Nantucket's president. Clipper was created as a replacement programming language for Ashton Tate's dBASE III, a very popular database language at the time. The advantage of Clipper over dBASE was that it could be compiled and executed on DOS as a standalone application. In the years between 1985 and 1992, millions of Clipper applications were built, typically for small businesses dealing with databases concerning many aspects of client management and inventory management. For many smaller businesses, having a Clipper application designed to their specific needs was their first experience with software development. Also many applications for banking and insurance companies were developed, here especially in those cases where the application was considered too small to be developed and run on traditional mainframes. In these environments Clipper also served as a front end for existing mainframe applications. As the product matured, it added elements of the programming languages C and Pascal, and object-oriented programming (OOP), and the code-block data-type (hybridizing the concepts of dBase macros, or string-evaluation, and function pointers), to become far more powerful than the original. Nantucket's Aspen project later matured into the Windows native-code CA-Visual Objects compiler. ==Market penetration==

Nantucket sold well in Western markets. Also, in November 1991, the New York Times reported the company's success in "painstakingly convincing Soviet software developers that buying is preferable to pirating". According to the article, Clipper had sold 2,000 copies in the Soviet Union (compared to 250,000 worldwide). Decline In the early 1990s, under new ownership, Many of the current implementations are portable (DOS, Windows, Linux (32- and 64-bit), Unix (32- and 64-bit), and macOS), supporting many language extensions, with much extended runtime libraries, and various Replaceable Database Drivers (RDD) supporting many popular database formats, like DBF, DBTNTX, DBFCDX (FoxPro, Apollo, Comix, and Advantage Database Server), MachSix (SIx Driver and Apollo), SQL, and more. These newer implementations all strive for full compatibility with the standard dBase/xBase syntax, while also offering OOP approaches and target-based syntax such as SQLExecute(). Usenet The Clipper Usenet newsgroups are comp.lang.clipper and comp.lang.clipper.visual-objects. == Programming ==

A simple hello world - application (fully functional after compiling): Procedure Main //Or Proc Main, same result. ? "Hello World!" Return //Or Retu, same result. A simple data base input mask (without actual function or procedure start/end): USE Customer clear @ 1, 0 Customer->CustNum Customer->CustNum > 0 @ 3, 0 Customer->Contact Customer->Contact) @ 4, 0 Customer->Address READ == Version history ==

The various Clipper versions, and release dates, were: From Nantucket Corporation; the "seasonal versions", billed as "dBase compilers": • Nantucket Clipper Winter'84 – May 25, 1985 • Nantucket Clipper Summer'85 – 1985 • Nantucket Clipper Winter'85 – January 29, 1986 • Nantucket Clipper Autumn'86 – October 31, 1986 • Nantucket Clipper Summer'87 – December 21, 1987 From Nantucket Corporation; Clipper 5: • Nantucket Clipper 5.00 – 1990 • Nantucket Clipper 5.01 – April 15, 1991 • Nantucket Clipper 5.01 Rev.129 – March 31, 1992 and from Computer Associates; CA-Clipper 5: • CA Clipper 5.01a – • CA Clipper 5.20 – February 15, 1993 • CA-Clipper 5.2a – March 15, 1993 • CA Clipper 5.2b – June 25, 1993 • CA-Clipper 5.2c – August 6, 1993 • CA Clipper 5.2d – March 25, 1994 • CA-Clipper 5.2e – February 7, 1995 • CA Clipper 5.30 – June 26, 1995 • CA Clipper 5.3a – May 20, 1996 • CA Clipper 5.3b – May 20, 1997 Clipper Tools After buying Nantucket, along with the standard Clipper library, CA developed another, named Clipper Tools. Three versions of this library were released, alongside Clipper versions. This library became a de facto standard among Clipper clones, such as xHarbour. It was also cloned by several of Clipper's clones. ==References==