Clipper programming language
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Clipper is a computer programming language that is used to create software programs that originally operated primarily under DOS. Although it is a powerful general-purpose programming language, it was used to create primarily database/business programs.
Clipper was originally created as a compiler for the (then) very popular dBASE III language. Compiling changes dBASE code from interpreted code, which must be interpreted every time each line of code is executed, to P-Code (or pseudo-code), which uses a Virtual Machine to process the compiled P-Code. P-Code is considerably faster, but still not as fast as the machine code generated by native compilers. Clipper was created by a company named Nantucket, and later sold to Computer Associates.
As the product matured, it remained a DOS tool for many years, but added elements of the C programming language and Pascal programming language, as well as OOP, and the unique 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 Window's native-code compiler Visual Objects.
As of 2005, the Clipper language is being actively implemented, and extended, by multiple organizations/vendors, free (GPL based) like Clip, Harbour, xHarbour, as well as commercial compilers like Xbase++ (http://www.AlaskaSoftware.com/), FlagShip (http://www.ship.com/).
Many of the current (2005) implementation are portable (DOS, windows, Linux (32,64), Unix (32,64), OS/X) and support many langauge syntax extensions (http://www.xharbour.org/index.asp?page=product/extensions), and greatly extended Run-Time libraries, as well as various Replaceable Database Drivers (RDD) supporting many popular database formats, like DBF, DBTNTX, DBFCDX (FoxPro, and Comix), MachSix (Apollo), SQL, and more, all compatible with the standard dBase/xBase syntax, while also offering OOP approaches, as well as target based syntax such as SQLExecute( ... ), etc..
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