#CA CLIPPER SOFTWARE SOFTWARE#
#CA CLIPPER SOFTWARE WINDOWS#

#CA CLIPPER SOFTWARE SOFTWARE#

The Clipper language is being actively implemented and extended by multiple organizations/vendors, like XBase++ from Alaska Software and FlagShip, as well as free ( GPL-licensed) projects like Harbour and xHarbour.

Some existing Clipper applications remained in active use for ten or fifteen years, requiring regular maintenance.Īround 2015, the number of Clipper applications that still saw daily commercial use was very small. The problem (a memory leak?) was later fixed by Computer Associates. Nantucket didn't address the issue and seemed reluctant to even acknowledge it. įour of the more important languages that took over from Clipper were Visual Basic, Microsoft Access, Delphi, and Powerbuilder.Īnother factor in Clipper's decline was that, under Clipper 5.0, some applications crashed frequently and unpredictably. As a result, almost no new commercial applications were written in Clipper after 1995.īy then, the 'classically trained programmer' commonly used strong typing, in contrast to the original dBASE language.Īn evolution of Clipper, named VO, added strong typing but made it optional, in order to remain compatible with existing code. In the early 1990s, under new ownership, Clipper failed to transition from MS-DOS to Microsoft Windows. According to the article, Clipper had sold 2,000 copies in the Soviet Union (compared to 250,000 worldwide). 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'.

#CA CLIPPER SOFTWARE WINDOWS#

Nantucket's Aspen project later matured into the Windows native-code CA- Visual Objects compiler. Īs 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 code-block data-type (hybridizing the concepts of dBase macros, or string-evaluation, and function pointers), to become far more powerful than the original. In these environments Clipper also served as a front end for existing mainframe applications. Also a lot of 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. For many smaller businesses, having a Clipper application designed to their specific needs was their first experience with software development. In the years between 19, millions of Clipper applications were built, typically for small businesses dealing with databases concerning many aspects of client management and inventory management. The advantage of Clipper over dBASE was that it could be compiled and executed under MS-DOS as a standalone application. Ĭlipper was created as a replacement programming language for Ashton Tate's dBASE III, a very popular database language at the time. In 1992, the company was sold to Computer Associates for 190 million dollars and the product was renamed to CA-Clipper. Larry Heimendinger was Nantucket's president.

Clipper was created by Nantucket Corporation, a company that was started in 1984 by Barry ReBell (management) and Brian Russell (technical)

Ca clipper software