How can I tell what version of Clipper my software used?

[fsd5858]

I have the sourcecode to my software that is written in clipper. How can I tell what version of clipper the software is written in? I need to make changes to the code, but need to either convert the software or get the Clipper compiler. Any suggestions?? If I convert it what language whould be the cleanest conversion?

Thank you!!

Sharon

 

[JCreamerII]

Sharon,

What is the date, time & size on the CLIPPER.exe.

Jim C.

 

[TonHu]

Running your executable with "//info" (note the double slash!) on the commandline (from a dos-prompt), should show the information you need, it could look like this:

F:\PROG\ESTHER>esther //info
Clipper (R) 5.2e Intl. (Rev. 216) BRITISH - ASCII Collation
DS=6696:0000  DS avail=35KB  OS avail=125KB  EMM avail=0KB

HTH
TonHu

 

[GriffMG]

If TonHu's suggestion whizzes off the screen too fast... try dropping the .exe into a hex editor (such as Hex Editor Nero) and search for clipper - one of them will be followed by the version used:

Clipper (R) 5.01.Clipper...

Regards

Griff
Keep [Smile]ing

There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.

 

[Stella740pl]

Sharon,


As for your second question,

If I convert it what language whould be the cleanest conversion?

I would suggest that you take a look at Visual FoxPro 9.0 - a modern visual object-oriented language, suitable for procedural programming as well. It's the latest version by Microsoft - but they said it will be the last one of the kind. As far as I can remember, it is supported through 2010, with extended support through 2015 - but hey, we use a lot of things well past the support end date.

I am partial to VFP, it is a great language, and a very good transition for any dBase family application. It's very likely that some of the programs handling business logic you can keep nearly intact, with minor corrections, and it's easy to transfer the tables (most likely, they will open as they are under VFP) - but you will have to recreate forms, menues, etc.

I've also seen a suggestion that PHP is a good conversion language for Clipper programs, but I cannot comment on this, I am not familiar with it.

Take a look at these older threads:
thread288-1184854
thread288-1193174,
and see if they are of any help.

 

[fsd5858]

Thank you for all your replies!!

I already have VFP 9.0. Does anyone have or know where I can get the Data Mapping between Clipper and VFP 9.0? Verb vs verb, etc. This would save us alot of time.

Thank you!

Sharon

 

[GriffMG]

An alternative would be to try xBase++ from Alaska.

They claim 100% compatibility - in practise it takes a bit of work to convert, but it's not bad.



Regards

Griff
Keep [Smile]ing

There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.

 

[TonHu]

And the ofcourse there's are the free 'ports' of Clipper to the modern world: Harbour-Project (

http://www.harbour-project.org)

and it's spin-off (aka: fork) xHarbour (

http://www.xHarbour.org

- free,

http://www.xHarbour.com

- commercial)

Depending on the quality of the design of the original software/source, a complete re-design in any modern language (Java, C#, ruby,...) should be considered.

HTH
TonHu