Clipper was originally created within 1985 as a compiler for dBASE III, a super popular database language at a instance. Compiling dBASE code changes it from taken code (i personally.e., mortal-readable source code), which must be interpreted every time to each one line of code is executed, to P-code (or pseudo-code), which utilizes the Virtual Machine to process a compiled P-code. P-code is well sooner, however however non when convenient when a machine code generated by native compilers. Clipper was created by Nantucket Corporation, and late sold to Computer Associates.

When the product matured, it remained a DOS tool for many years, however added elements of the C programming language and Pascal programming language, when well as OOP, and a code-prevent data-type (hybridizing the conception of dBase macros, or string-evaluation, and function pointers), to become far supplementary right than a original. Nantucket's Aspen task late matured into a Windows native-code Visual Objects compiler.

As of 2005, the Clipper language is existence actively implemented, & extended, by multiple organizations/vendors, free (GPL-licensed) like Clip, Harbour, xHarbour, when well as commercial compilers such as [http://www.alaskasoftware.com/ Xbase++], & [http://www.fship.com/ FlagShip].

Numerous of the todays (2005) implementations are personal (DOS, Windows, Linux (32- and 64-bit), UNIX (32- & 64-bit), and OS X), supporting many language extensions [http://www.xharbour.org/index.asp?page=product/extensions], & use greatly extended runtime libraries, when well as various Replaceable Database Drivers (RDD) supporting numbers of popular database formats, rather DBF, DBTNTX, DBFCDX (FoxPro and Comix), MachSix (Apollo), SQL, and sir thomas more. These freshly implementations everthing strive for fully compatibility by owning a standard dBase/xBase syntax, when besides offering OOP approaches & target-depending syntax like SQLExecute().

As of 2005, the Clipper Usenet newsgroups [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.clipper comp.lang.clipper] and [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.clipper.visual-objects comp.lang.clipper.visual-objects] are however active.

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