[In danger of going off topic, but there is some ruby content]
Those who know and remember Clipper (and Fox, and probably dBase) will
also recognise its case statement as being such a facility:
[SNIP]
I used Clipper for work and free-lancing (many years back). It is a
surprise that the great Clipper hacker is in this list (actually, as a
student nuby, I myself, am surprised why I’m here in a list full of
superprogrammers).
As someone who, for many years, made a living out of working with Clipper
I’ve got more than a passing interest in ruby in that, in some areas, it has
a familiar feel. Also, as someone who is a bit of a Lisp fan I find it to be
a language that’s somewhere in the middle, not as flexible as something like
Common Lisp but much more flexible than something like Clipper. I’ve been
having quite a lot of fun finally getting to know ruby and there’s a real
danger of it turning into my cross platform “scripting language” (sorry
about that, I can seldom think of a better term) of choice.
Hi Dave, I stopped programming ten years ago. Maybe ruby and clipper can
resurrect me. I remember clipper has “code blocks”, too, right?
Yes, Clipper 5.0 introduced the idea of code blocks although they’re nowhere
near as flexible as those found in ruby, mostly because you can’t use
statements within them. They do, however, have a familiar look to them:
···
,----
oPeople:each( {|sName, sAge| PrintStuff( sName, sAge ) } )
`----
I do not
know status of clipper now…
CA-Clipper, the compiler, is still sold but is more or less moribund, it’s
still a DOS oriented compiler. You’ve got various add-ons that let you
develop for (16bit) Windows too but that’s about it. VO obviously exists and
some see that as the “next generation” of Clipper. There’s FlagShip for Unix
platforms and Xbase++ for Windows and OS/2.
There are also a couple of free software implementations kicking about.
There’s harbour URL:http://www.harbour-project.org/, which aims to be very
compatible with CA-Clipper and also aims to be as cross-platform as
possible. Clip URL:http://www.english.itk.ru/clipper/index.html is another
free software implementation but it’s more Unix oriented and its licence
isn’t as liberal as harbour’s (at least, it wasn’t the last time I checked).
–
Dave Pearson | OSLib - Timeslice release functions.
http://www.davep.org/ | eg - Norton Guide reader for Linux.
http://www.davep.org/clipper/ | weg - Norton Guide reader for Windows.
Norton Guide Readers - davep | dgscan - DGROUP scanner for Clipper.