djdj@ur-tut.UUCP (06/10/87)
There has been a lot of talk lately about "compilers" for DBase III.
I was wondering if there are any third party vendors that sell similar
compilers for the RBase products from Microrim. Anybody have any ideas?
--
D.J. Meyer uucp: ...{seismo, decvax}!rochester!ur-tut!djdj
BITNET: DJDJ@UORVM
AT & T: (716) 275-4563mjr@well.UUCP (Matthew Rapaport) (06/12/87)
In article <1440@ur-tut.UUCP> djdj@ur-tut.UUCP (DJ Meyer) writes: >There has been a lot of talk lately about "compilers" for DBase III. >I was wondering if there are any third party vendors that sell similar >compilers for the RBase products from Microrim. Anybody have any ideas? >-- Dbase and DataFlex both store programs and data in seperate files that can be edited with any word processor. They are thus amenable to being compiled. Microrim, and Ansa (Paradox) store code, data, indexes, etc. in One or a few big database files with all things bundled together. programs are distinguishable from data by the internal directory facilities of the DBMS, but to a DOS "dir" they look like scrambled junk. Thus third parties seeking to build a compiler for Rbase V (for example) would have to have the internal file layouts of the Rbase "RBS" files, and these layouts are proprietary information. To release such things, would be releasing internal operations secrets, something I don't think these vendors will do. To sum up, products like Rbase cannot be compiled stand alone because everything is wrapped up together and managed by the internal directory facilities of the package. In a funny way, this is what a good DBMS SHOULD do, and all the BIG packages operate in a similar way. It is ironic that by doing it "wrong", Dbase becomes potentially more powerful! Of course you CAN interfact to Rbase through pascal or C, and most of the "big" DBMS's also provide such interfaces. If you need compiled code addressing the Rbase data files, why not write in C?