Squeak smalltalk adventure

Clipper from Nantucket

Very soon after Ashton-Tate released their very popular dBase III system, a slew of other software were offered to the market which offered the same database files and the same programming interface. dBFast was one of the fastest ones and had a very innovative system where it used the IO services of the operating system allowing it to have a very small footprint. One could create an execitable program with a file size of only 10KB. It was blazingly fast which I liked very much. The only problem I found with it was that it could not return a value the way C does. Having a value returned was a convenient way to structure a program.

Foxbase also introduced a similar product which claimed to be faster than dBase III. The way they did it was to compile the source code into an intermediate bytecode file which is then run by the compiler. This is much faster than the dBase III system which is purely interpreted. Foxbase which eventually evolved into FoxPro also allowed the creation of user-defined functions but it was limited in the fact that it could not return values. It also meant that the compiled bytecodes needed the services of the interpreter to run the semi-compiled program.

What I, and I'm sure a number of dBase programmers wished for was a compiler that could create free-standing executable files. Nantucket Software must have heard our prayers because they released a compiler that produced EXE files. The early edition had certain quirks which were quickly corrected. With the Norton Editor, the Plinker and dBase III for creating DBF files, one could create an executable file with database capabilities. Clipper was quite fast and pretty soon had a number of libraries that extended its functionality. It was not uncommon to find programmers struggling with programs that went over the 1MB limit imposed by the Intel PC architecture. Well to be truthful, the struggle was really about getting more memory as it seemed kind of a badge of achievement to write an application that boasted a 2MB footprint. Microsoft very quickly, as did other third-party vendors, rolled out software drivers that allowed programs to use extended memories.

I learned very quickly that Clipper tended to grow so fast and added many features that tended to make old libraries incompatible with the new releases. It was therefore prudent not to chase the new releases if one wanted not to multiply the problems of updating old files. My solution was to choose the very basic libraries and stayed away from the new-fangled extended libraries. Those facilities that kept changing and were largely black boxes like Tbrowse, I stayed away from. I wrote my own file browser and a few other things that enabled me to keep my executable file to under 300 KB. Clipper had everything that I wanted at the time and allowed me to structure my programs so efficiently I could bring out a whole new program in a matter of days instead of the many months that other dBase programmers needed to finish an accounting application.
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posted by underdog @ 3:13 AM