In August 1994 (Shipped December 1995) a first version became available and was called: Clipper VO (virtual objects) It was truly windows based but had to cope with many typical first issue bugs that were not explained to the full extend. Too late, or at least the research was not given top priority for research and development. Too late the Nantucket company realized it had to port the Clipper environment to the Windows platform as well and began developing a new project: Aspen: Clipper for Windows. Objects and classes could be created but the language needed more, and quickly, should it keep its programmers corps it had created since 1984. This made the Clipper language more sophisticated, but completely OO it never was. Nantucket’s answer was: Clipper 5.0 up to 5.3. But for the hard core hackers no door was kept close.Īround the early 1990’s the users felt a need for a more object oriented environment. Between the manufacturers of decompilers and Clipper a covenant was agreed that with a certain code in the source the decompilers would not decompile. There were even commercial packages for that. One of the disadvantages, for commercial developers at least, was that a clipper executable could easily be disassembled or de-compiled to produce native source code. Libraries were also made by third parties but the programmer could also create its own library or enhance the existing ones. When you missed a feature, an interface or whatever you could program that yourself and the extension made a reusable part of your toolbox. One of the language’s features: the possibility to link ‘C’ and machine language objects made it a virtual unlimited expandable environment. Clipper often served as a front end exactly for the above mentioned mainframe applications and did very well in this area. Many applications for banking and insurance companies were developed were the application was considered too small to be developed and run on mainframes.

Millions of applications were built typically for businesses dealing with small databases like client management, stock keeping. Originally is was used as a replacement programming language for Ashton Tate’s dbase II database environment that could be compiled and executed as a standalone application. Ĭlipper was a typical database development language and DOS based. Developed by Nantucket software and released in winter of 1984, first shipping.

Clipper Compiler For Windows