>The main reason of Clipper popularity here is that the half-baked weekend programmers saw that "hey, it creates an exe, nobody can steal my code". I always wandered why are they so anxious. Actually, I once wrote an app in Clipper, back in '88, and it also had some protection scheme, which included renaming all the vars to some stupid and delusive names, and a message routine which triggered (on its 66th call) an authenticity check. Next year I discovered Fox...
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I am sorry, but that is not the MAIN reason. Did you ever use Clipper? The language had commands in it, that VFP still doesn't have. The Pre compiler had functionality that I still long for in VFP... and the number of Clipper add-ons and libraries rivled what you can find for VB now.

Also, while Clipper didn't have Rushmore or embeded SQL, with the VernSix RDD, and the FlexFile library I would put its xBase speed up against FoxDOS any day... and there is still no machine that can drive a windows program to give you the speed that Clipper screens give you. Our DOS product's screens were 100% data driven, and they rendered and populated faster than the FoxPro 2.6 screens that were compiled SPR's.

No, the fact that Clipper could make .EXE's out of dBase garbage code was NOT the MAIN reason for it's popularity.

Heck, Clippers Browse and Get were OOP, and if I understood the power of it at the time, I would have done 100% of my aps with ClassY, and never looked back! But, I found Zachary, and was hooked.

BOb