Clipper - What goes away will come back with a bang

[praseedp]

Hi all ,

In the early and mid 90s , Clipper Programming language was a popular
tool for writing small business applications. Even to this day ,
Systems written in this language are empowering small and medium
business to do their transactions.

I worked with Clipper between June 1993 and October 1996. I was good
at mixing
Clipper , C ( Turbo C/C++ 1.0 ) and Tasm (Turbo Assembler ) to develop
"fast" applications.

I switched to Windows 16 bit and 32 bit system programming from there
and for all
practical purpose , Clipper vanished from my life. The Nostalgia for
that language
was lingering in my mind all these days.

Couple of week back , in a K-MUG ( Kerala Microsoft User Group )
thread there was a discussion about changing the startup code to make
entry point function with a different name ( other than main ). To
demonstrate this , i installed DOSBOX and procured a Turbo C/C++ ver
3.0 compiler from a friend of mine. Unfortunately, the source
directory was not copied into his archive and i could not achieve my
objective.

While playing with DOSBOX , i tried re-compiling my Clipper Summer 87
release based Accounting / Inventory package which i wrote in the year
1994. The stuff worked fine and i could work with Binary under Windows
32 , Linux 32 bit and MAC OS X 64 bit using DOSBOX. ( With the help of
DOSBOX , i could run my code on all the platforms )

I have experimented with Harbour project last year and had blogged
about it . ( Read Clipper Nostalgia tag in my blog ) Harbour Compiler
can compile a superset of Clipper 5.3 code. For that , i need to
migrate my Clipper code from Summer 87 release to Clipper 5.3. By
pinging my friends , finally i got Clipper 5.3 compiler.
After couple of hours of effort , i modified my code a bit to be
correctly compiled
under Clipper 5.3

Then , i did download Harbour binaries for Visual C++ ( Ya, Harbour
generates C code
from you Clipper code [ the C code generated by Harbour is an
interesting read in
it's own right and that is a topic for another blog entry ] and you
need to compile
the generated source using the Platform's native compiler. ). After
setting some environment variables , i was ready for my port to Win32

To my surprise , the Code got translated into Visual C++ code
correctly and with the harbour batch files (after a minor tweak ) , i
generated a Win32 Executable !!!!!.
Some thing which was practically dead got resurrected. My joy knew no
bounds.

I Played witht the executable to break it and it was rock solid.
12,000 lines of Clipper code got compiled and linked into Win32
executable without a single error.

I repeated the same stuff with GNU Linux ( Fedora 9 ) and MAC OS X
( Snow leopord )
using GCC and i am convinced that we can write Cross Platform
applications with Clipper ( using Harbour Compiler and Visual C++ [ in
Linux and MAC OS X , it is gcc ] )

I was solely focused on Microsoft Technologies all these years and
ocassionally i used to foray into Unixes and Linux. In the past six
months ( from February 14th to be exact ) i was experimenting with
Cross Platform Programming.

I have now got solid expertize in Software portability and has helped
couple of companies migrate their Windows applications to Linux and a
Company to port Linux
Application to Windows.

Here are the stuff we can do to save our investment in existing
software infrastructure

a ) if you have got a 16 bit application without source , but binary
works fine ,
use DOSBOX to run the stuff under Win32,Win64 , Linux 32/64 , MAC OS
X.

b) if you have got the source code of your Xbase application , use
Harbour to generate native binaries for Windows , Linux and MAC OS X.

c) if you have got the source code of your Win32 Application and that
is written
in C/C++ , use WineLib to port the stuff to MAC OS X and Linux

d) if your application is written using Visual Basic , use Wine to run
under Linux
and MAC OS X ( it works in most cases )

e) if you have got a .NET application written for Windows , use Mono
to run under
Windows, Linux and MAC OS X


if FOSS people are reading this , here is an opportunity to give
Microsoft run for it's money. The above methods work for Xbase
programs (80% of apps written between 1985 and 2000 MSDOS) , Visual C+
+/Visual Basic Programs (90% of apps written in the 32 bit world )
and .NET programs (2002 - Current ). It covers 90% of application code
base under Windows. All can come to GNU Linux very fast. Then
Microsoft will find it hard to come up with new technologies very
fast . Any takers ?

regards
Praseed Pai

Source :- http://praseedp.blogspot.com/2010/08/clipper-what-goes-away-will-come-back.html

[praseedp]

Hi all ,
Did any one read the latter part of my post , for the convenience i
am pasting it here

> Source :-http://praseedp.blogspot.com/2010/08/clipper-what-goes-away-will-come...