Also it took a while to get my head around SQL, after starting this way, and the way they did record navigation and search.
It was delightfully easy to build fully functioning text mode applications. I especially liked the picture clauses on form reads. When I later learned about curses it was a huge disappointment. curses/ncurses with tips from the xBase world would be great for those that need to write terminal applications.
@ row, col say "First Name:"
to draw a box:
@ top_row, top_left to bottom_row, bottom_right
there was built-in support for menus.
there were commands to save the screen to variable and then restore the screen.
main_screen = savescreen
restscreen(main_screen)
Everything was really simple. Forms were super easy. There was a command of the form:
@ row, col say "First name:" get first_name @ row+1, col say "Last name:" get last_name read
Each statement would be on a separate line:
@ x, y say "First name"
@ col2, y get first_name
@ x, y+2 say "Last name"
@ col2, y+2 get last_name
readFor some time, this world was fully proprietary in Brazil and you had to pay big bucks for tools or resort to unlicensed copies (piracy). Since the second option was unavailable for the public sector and bigger companies, this created an horrible dependency on proprietary inferior software tools that took around a decade to heal. It is a good thing Linux was so successful in some many points of the stack.
An anecdata: a few years ago I bought something in a drugstore that was running a Linux desktop with DosBox running something in Clipper. I also saw Linux desktops accessing something running in Clipper, in apparently a DOS (virtual?) machine, remotely through telnet. Funny but somewhat ugly reality that is fortunately becoming extinct.
Things only got marginally different (better) when during the first decade of the 2000's systems started to go on-line, mostly with LAMP winning against ASP and then, more recently, with the advent of Android apps coupled with cloud services.
The language has been slightly expanded and with external libraries you may have gui programs (win32, qt, gtk) l, connect to databases (sqlite, mariadb,postgres...) create PDF, excel files.
I have a program started in 1986 on dbase III, then ported to Clipper and now to Harbour...
I still work on software that started out in dBase II in 1986 or so, then went to FoxBase+ when I started in 1988, then Foxpro and now Visual Foxpro.
actionfromafar•9mo ago