41–50 of 88 posts
Microsoft Access 2.0 had filters to import and export data from and to DBF files. We used this in WFW 3.11 to convert from DBase to MS-Access and later on SQL Server. There were some Turbo C and Turbo Pascal source code that read DBF files, but hardly anyone used them. Most stored data is in text files that can be read by any application.
I find this blog consistently negative (check other posts.) Although this post is interesting, and I know little about dBase and this is a sad story, I am simply not sure how accurate all of the blog as a whole is. I can best suggest, take its statements as someone's personal opinion, not necessarily as fact, ie but with a pinch of salt. > It is believed that - alongside the BOLD source code (missing for more than 10…
Funny aside: I remember the first time my GE boss asked me for an invoice as it was the only way he could pay me. I had no idea what it should look like. So he sent me to the PM of one of the COBOL contractor teams who gave me a template that I copied. The PM eventually asked me to do some COBOL programming for them as well. Good times.
The article states >By feeding legacy PRG (circa 1985) and logics to models like Claude, ChatGPT, developers can now instruct the AI to translate decades-old dBase PRG directly into memory-safe Rust, highly concurrent Go, or modern Dart/Flutter cross-platform applications. And it alludes to this early on, but it doesn't show any examples.
As an alternative to leaving this to an LLM I came across: https://github.com/infused/dbf/ I'm not sure what the article suggests - create a custom rust program that reads and writes to a given dbf file? Create a rust program that mirrors the PRG code, writing/reading data in a custom format?
I remember dBASE IV from my childhood days when my father, who had no computer background, was required to take computer training by his workplace. My father and his colleagues were given free evening computer lessons by their company, taught by the same teachers who used to teach us, the kids, computers in our school. After their first class, he brought home a fat dBASE IV manual. Since I was very interested in comp…
Perhaps this is why BASIC originally used LET in the form LET X = X + 1, to imply a calculation rather than equality.
When FORTRAN gained equality it went for .EQ. out of practicality and necessity. Many others followed suit but used the somewhat more pleasant == instead of .EQ..
But it didn’t have to happen that way. ALGOL decided to stick close to mathematical tradition:
= for equality
:= for assignment ("definition")
While x := x + 1 is still not clean mathematical notation, I think it wouldn’t have riled up OP’s father as much. If he’d squinted enough, he might even have been able to see little indices below the x’s there.
I remember dBASE IV from my childhood days when my father, who had no computer background, was required to take computer training by his workplace. My father and his colleagues were given free evening computer lessons by their company, taught by the same teachers who used to teach us, the kids, computers in our school. After their first class, he brought home a fat dBASE IV manual. Since I was very interested in comp…
So despite it being an incredibly old file format it's still used constantly in the GIS world and it's probably not going to go away because while it's not a good format, it does basically everything at to at least a mediocre level which can't be said for any of the newer formats that tend to do a few things great but other things terribly.
Like Geojson is great for interchange but you can't really do in place edits or even in place seeking from disk, shapefile can.
Sqlite allows great editing and seeking but you can't use that in a browser without doing something complicated like compiling the sqlite binary to js or wasm.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps this is why BASIC originally used LET in the form LET X = X + 1, to imply a calculation rather than equality.
The = for assignment is FORTRAN’s fault. In the beginning there was no equality, just assignment, and FORTRAN (being just a FORmula TRANslator after all) made the somewhat dubious decision to use = for that (punch card space being sparse and symbols limited and all). When FORTRAN gained equality it went for .EQ. out of practicality and necessity. Many others followed suit but used the somewhat more pleasant == instea…
x := 4
x ⇐ 4I find this blog consistently negative (check other posts.) Although this post is interesting, and I know little about dBase and this is a sad story, I am simply not sure how accurate all of the blog as a whole is. I can best suggest, take its statements as someone's personal opinion, not necessarily as fact, ie but with a pinch of salt. > It is believed that - alongside the BOLD source code (missing for more than 10…