

CLIPPER SUMMER 87 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING FREE
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 continued in use for ten or fifteen years, requiring regular maintenance, but around 2015 the number of Clipper applications that were still used commercially on a daily basis, was very small. Three of the more important languages that took over from Clipper were Visual Basic, Delphi and Powerbuilder. As a result, almost no new commercial applications were written in Clipper after 1995.
CLIPPER SUMMER 87 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING WINDOWS
Nantucket's Aspen project later matured into the Windows native-code Visual Objects compiler.ĭespite these efforts in the early nineties under its new ownership Clipper proved to be unable to make a smooth transition from the MS-DOS to the MS-Windows-area. In these environments Clipper also served as a front end for existing mainframe applications.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. 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. In 1992, the company was sold to Computer Associates for 190 million dollars and the product was renamed to CA-Clipper.Ĭlipper was created as a replacement programming language for Ashton Tate's dBASE III, a very popular database language at the time.

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