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dBase: 1979-2026

delphinightmares.substack.com

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Re: dBase: 1979-2026

#31

Post by pjc50 »

gpderetta wrote: post #26
pjc50 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a notational issue. IIRC Pascal used := for assignment and = for equality testing. Where this becomes extremely Rorsarch is the spectrum between "notation is absolutely critical: there is only one correct representation of programs in people's heads and we have to match that exactly" vs. "all program text is ultimately syntactic sugar and programmers will just adapt to whatever". History tells us that the C choi…

I think parent was alluding to mutability.

While I'm a big fan of immutable design, it makes some algorithms much more expensive and ultimately DRAM is mutable. And the example we're talking about could be a loop counter!

Re: dBase: 1979-2026

#32

Post by hh2222 »

susam wrote: post #12

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.

Re: dBase: 1979-2026

#33

Post by zer »

One of my first jobs had a legacy application that was based on Clipper. I never had to work with it directly (since I worked on the SQL successor) but reading the source code was still fascinating.

Semi off-topic: The wikipedia article on Ed Esber is in dire need of a clean up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Esber

Re: dBase: 1979-2026

#34

Post by cryo32 »

hh2222 wrote: post #32
susam wrote: post #12

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.

Think that was just to make the parser understand it was an assignment without having to do any lookahead. There was also possibly ambiguous stuff with equality and assingment as they both used =.

Re: dBase: 1979-2026

#35

Post by flr03 »

I remember my father built its own personal accounting tool using dbase, I think it was MSDOS at the time, I was a kid. Quite the achievement I think, he was not a software engineer, just hobbyist.

Re: dBase: 1979-2026

#36

Post by boshomi »

orionblastar wrote: post #4

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.

MS Access can use DBF files almost as if they were standard Access tables. This was particularly useful when working with ESRI Shapefiles, as it allowed the DBF files to be edited in Access and the changes to be viewed directly in ArcGIS. When editing maps, Access was often more convenient than the ESRI Editor.

Re: dBase: 1979-2026

#37

Post by Jemm »

I worked in dBase professionally for a long time. Loved the system but the database constantly needing repair was an issue.

Re: dBase: 1979-2026

#38

Post by jamal-kumar »

michibertel wrote: post #27

I still maintain a VFP9 project from time to time. Although AI has been extremely helpful in writing VFP9 code, I can't imagine migrating this enormous project, which has grown over the course of 30 years, to a more modern system by feeding the source code to AI. While one could debate which approach would be best for migrating such a project, an 'AI-led Big Bang Migration' would be insane. However, AI would certainl…

If you're ever looking to migrate off of that a better starting point is finding a way to dump the DBF files into CSV (there's a perl script for this that works wonders called DBF2CSV but I hear LibreOffice can just open these files too)...

After inheriting a project where the source code CDROM went missing I can definitely see a use case for at least trying with the latest frontier models to rescue the logic because it took me a while to reverse that thing manually to fix a bug with radare2

Re: dBase: 1979-2026

#40

Post by jjkaczor »

vintagedave wrote: post #20

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…

... Well - with a blog title of "Delphi Nightmares", I would expect uh critical or negative commentary... It's right there in the name.
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