Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!steve From: steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield) Newsgroups: comp.databases Subject: Re: dBase IV Bug(s)? Message-ID: <23732@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: 28 Apr 89 15:23:27 GMT References: <1762@muvms1.bitnet> <1719@ccnysci.UUCP> <62@dbase.UUCP> Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 27 In article <62@dbase.UUCP> awd@dbase.UUCP (Alastair Dallas) writes: #>I don't want to waste the net's time if this discussion isn't interesting to #>other people. Obviously, I'm one of the authors of dBASE IV--I think it's #>great; not only that, but I have a financial interest in it (my job), too. #> #>Perhaps I shouldn't have said "merely" a clone, but FoxBase+ offers very #>few improvements to III+--arrays, UDFs and multi-child relations #>come to mind. dBASE IV includes those (in a better implementation, in my As one who's written dozens of laborious stupid pseudo-arrays in dBASE II and dBASEIII+ (McMax) using macros and fighting the 64 variable limit in dBASE II, I would hardly minimize the importance of adding arrays. Had I been offered a rival program, identical in all respects to dBASE but with arrays, I'd gladly have paid considerably more to get it (and saved a lot of programming time). I have no comment on dBASE IV since it isn't available to me on the Macintosh anyway. But my only reason for getting into dBASE in the first place was that it was compatible with the word processor I used in 1983 and the other database program I looked at (which looked much better than dBASE) was not [hint: I hate WordStar even more than I hate dBASE, so it wasn't WS that was incompatible with the other program]. From the beginning, dBASE has been buggy and poor on features. I think most of us continue to use it only because we know it and because it is the most widely used program. Steve Goldfield