>>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...
>>
>
>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.

I did use Clipper S87 for that one app, and when 5.0 was issued, I was just too deep in Fox. I've grown up (as a programmer) in an interpreted environment, where you could try anything from the command line/dot prompt/command window, and the two years I've spent in compiled languages increased my smoking a lot... what else to do while it compiles? Remeber, it was more than ten years ago.

>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.

The ability to BROWSE an array or a text file was a private envy of mine, also the syntax where you could initialize an entire array in a single line... but then, OTOH, I never actually liked having to hunt for good libraries - for one, it made you pretty much unable to communicate with others who didn't use those libraries, and Fox had everything right out of the box. Anyway, when Clipper got all those goodies, it was just too late for me.

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

I'm talking about here - whenever I asked a Clipper programmer about Fox, they said "nice, but it doesn't make an .exe, so anyone can steal my code". Well, that was back in early 90s. BTW, I never went to a meeting where two programmers promised me a rich dinner to persuade their boss that Fox is better than Clipper :)

>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.

Actually, the latest (last?) editions of Clipper looked just like a preprocessor for C - you could actually write C function calls instead of xBase commands, if I'm not wrong. Clipper was really a fine language in the end, the fact that many cowboy take-the-money-and-run programmers used it here doesn't have nothing to do with its qualities. Besides, most of these guys went to FPD or Access in the meantime.