Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!mailrus!ukma!munish From: munish@ms.uky.edu (Munish Mehra) Newsgroups: comp.databases Subject: Re: PC database Message-ID: <12824@s.ms.uky.edu> Date: 3 Oct 89 17:07:02 GMT References: <1205@orbit.UUCP> Reply-To: munish@ms.uky.edu (Munish Mehra) Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences Lines: 62 Clarion is a database programming language that can be run under a preprocessor or compiled into an exe file It allows linking with C, Pascal etc, There are two levels you can use it at. It has something called designer that generates Clarion code once you spec out your database details. ie. data dictionary, menus, tables, data entry screens, file processing. Everything can be done using menus and you needn't write any code. You can actually program designer to tailor your needs. So in some sense it is a meta language. This is very neat to design quick applications or prototypes. A lot of EX dbase and foxbase users swear by it. The problem with this is, to tweak the code you really need to understand the Clarion language in some detail. And ofcourse once you've tweaked it you can't go back into designer. Instead of using designer you can program directly in the Clarion language, a mixture of C, Pascal, Fortran and probably most other languages. They claim it has the strengths of all these high level languages. (I think it isn't as great as they claim, and I also suspect the guy who designed the language and wrote the compiler didn't really understand the intricasies of programming languages or compilers !) The language has all the necessary constructs and data structures for writing database applications including an interactive utility to design and generate code for Screens(For menus or Data Entry) and Reports. These are really neat and cut development time significantly. The language also allows caching records etc. It allows setting up of a chained help subsystem theat you can tie to screens or individual fields. The tech. support is good and they have a 24 Hr Bulletin Board that is very useful. The language/package has minimal security features, and to make the system secure you have to do it yourself. There is no Audit trail. The major shortcomming I find are the following (and somebody can tell me how these compares with other languages). (1) there is no equivalent of the pascal assign(file,filename) or C fp=fopen(filename,filemode) (2) there are no pointers. (3) screens can not be passed as function parameters. (4) On exitting a function all screens that were opened in it are closed. (5) There are no variables of type FILE or FIELD, these are all predefined constants. And there are some more which I'll try and write coherently and post. Incidentally there is a fairly large following of people using Clarion to develop "address book" kind of applications in a day, that they charge clients $$$$'s for. And the other thing that @#$%^% me of about Clarion is that, you can only have one variable declared on a line and it must be in Column 1. I've always heard of people switching from dbase/foxbase etc to Clarion but none the other way. Are there any out there. My personal summary on database languages : If you are a "programmer" use C (get a good set of functions and you have the "power" to do what you want - FAST) Emerald Bay was running a special $99 or something. Go ahead guys, try it, It may be what you've longed for. munish