(Disclaimer: I'm not only a fan of FlagShip but a developer of FlagShip add-ons and a reseller of WGS's Linux package. But they honestly do have a great product.)
The most popular tool to perform such a task is FlagShip, distributed in the US by
<url name="WorkGroup Solutions, Inc." url="http://www.wgs.com"> Post Office Box 460190 Aurora, Colorado 80046-0190 Sales: +1 303 699 7470 Email: info@wgs.com
FlagShip claims to be "NOT a porting tool" but "in fact a full Unix implemetation of CA-Clipper through version 5.2e." A spokesman goes on to say that "the fact that C intermediate code exists is useful for some, but safe to ignore for most users."
There is also a freeware portable translator for Clipper called X2c. This used to be a commercial product but the publisher decided to redirect its resources to other projects.
C Libraries for using .DBF and index files include:
herCules APIS Software Frankfurt/Main, Germany Includes source code, understands NDX, MDX, NTX, and IDX files. Supports DOS, Windows, OS/2, and UNIX/XENIX. SoftC Database Library SoftC, Ltd. Anoka, Minnesota USA Source code and Windows DLL included. Supports DOS, Windows, OS/2, and UNIX/XENIX. <url name="Sequiter Software" url="http://www.supernet.ab.ca/Mall/Computer/Sequiter/sequiter.htm"> CodeBase and CodeBase++
Contributions by Mark Bolzern (WGS), Barry Mavin (Recital), Guenter Schwaninger, and Rich Roth
Last updated 1 January 1994; contributions by Brad H. Codd of Aladdin.
A product from Aladdin allows your CA-Clipper application to access native AS400 data files at the record level. Call Aladdin at +27 11 642-4588. Technical support was promised to be available in Los Angeles, California USA beginning January 1992, but I have not verified this.
As of July 1993 I have been informed that this can also be done with CAS400 by T.L. Creates at +1 209 946 0105, and with Clip2 by Dabiwa, Ltd., at +1 215 692 8130.
An RDD called Win/400 does the same. I don't have contact info for this product though.
Rushmore is not an index type, nor is it magic as the Fox people would have you believe. It is simply a FoxPro feature that automatically figures out the most efficient way to use existing indexes in a query (LOCATE, LIST, anything with a FOR clause, etc.).
Rushmore is handy for interactive queries, but most application developers can know ahead of time what lookups need to be done on their database files and can arrange for an optimized lookup the old-fashioned way with little effort.
That's why the Rushmore test results look so good but are not very relevant to what many application developers really do. If you are trying to write a very open-ended reporting program, on the other hand, it may be just the ticket.
Third-party database drivers (RDDs) for Clipper can perform similar query optimization. Two that I know of are Mach Six (included in The SIx Driver package) and ClipMore (an add-in to COMIX).
First off, there are several advantages to using a FoxPro-like index scheme.
*.CDX files can contain more than one "tag," each of which relates
to an index key. Therefore you can drop all your many CA-Clipper
*.NTX files by converting each to a "tag" within a single .CDX file.
This also lets you always open a file with USE <file>
INDEX <file>
with assurance that you got all the tags. Better still, when
you perform a plain
USE <file>,
the driver will automatically
find and open a corresponding .CDX file with the same base name
as the datafile.
Replaceable Database Drivers which support FoxPro-like files are:
SIx itself does not give you Rushmore lookups, but it is shipped with an add-in called MACH which does. Likewise Comix has an accompanying library called ClipMore which does the same thing.
The modem on a serial port can be looked at as just another file as far as output is concerned. (This is a useful oversimplification.) You just need to open the serial port as a file and write a string such as "ATDT123-4567" followed by a carriage return and line feed to send a Hayes-compatible dial command to the modem. A function like this would do the job nicely:
FUNCTION dialphone (nPort, cNumber)
LOCAL nFile := FCREATE ("COM" + STR (nPort, 1)) // Open port
FWRITE (nFile, "ATDT"+cNumber+CHR(13)+CHR(10)) // Write ATDT command
FCLOSE (nFile) // Close it
RETURN NIL