From: bill@Celestial.COM (Bill Campbell)
Subject: Re: Info on FilePro
Organization: Celestial Software, Mercer Island, WA
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 06:56:05 GMT

In <9301211803.AA05126@dynamix.com> david@dynamix.com (David L Jarvis) writes:

:> >> You will find that those of us who use filePro are really
:> >> enamored of the product and wouldn't want to use anything else.
:> >
:> >Great description Bill ... and of course, I agree completely! :-)
:> >#----------------------------------------------------------------------#
:> stuff deleted....
:> 
:>    I,ve been using with Filepro since about 1983.
:> 
:>    I wish you boys would keep it down.  If everyone used Filepro, I'd have 
:> some competition in my area of applications.
:> 
:>    You programmers out there just stick to the major DB's and leave the
:> little unknown DB's to us beginners.

:hahahahaaaa...... but I can be so much more productive with filePro, and
:create so much more robust apps, there's no way in h*ll I'd switch!
:(I've used Informix, Foxbase+, and the other assorted names)

:But you bring out a good point ... filePro is an environment that even a
:novice can use to accomplish simple tasks ... but it also provides the
:advanced features programmers need to design complex apps ...
:Sorry, I sound like a magazine ad :-)

I guess someone has to play the Devil's Advocate here since these
guys are praising FilePro to the skies.  I gave up on FilePro
back in 1985 because it was too difficult to produce efficient
applications, and its toy editor and ':' delimited processing
tables made it difficult/impossible to use standard software
engineering tools, build reusable libraries, or other things that
I'd learned to use over the 19 years I'd been building
applications programs then (I started on mainframes in 1966).  I
chose Unify for my development platform at the time because of
its speed and built-in referential integrity, but Unify is
definitely NOT a tool for amateurs!.

FilePro is a lot easier to use for simple applications than dbase
and its derivatives.  Many (most?) FilePro developers are ex
Radio Shack types who learned it when it was Profile II on the
Model II or Profile 16 on the Model 16/6000 systems.  The
accounting applications we sell now had their origin as my customer
calling database which I originally built using Profile II on the
Model II in 1980.  Profile 16 was a vast improvement since it
allowed lookups in other files :-).

IMHO the major limitations of FilePro are (Small Computer may
have fixed some of these since I last looked at it seriously):
    -   Brain-Dead editor (the alternative is to edit ':'
        delimited files by hand).  The ascii file formats are
        difficult to read in their raw format.  It's difficult to
        properly add comments to code.

    -   No ability to build libraries that can be called easily
        from applications.

    -   Limited variable names.  The programming language is
        similar to the original BASIC language when it had two
        character names.

    -   No central data dictionary.  Each FilePro file is
        independent of all others.  You can do lookups from one
        file to another, but there's nothing in FilePro to keep
        you from deleting records from a master file while there
        are still detail records referencing the master.  FilePro
        is really a flat-file manager.

    -   Inefficient data storage.  Everything is stored in ascii
        meaning that a number with 999999.99 takes 9 bytes.  The
        first FilePro system I converted to Unify was almost
        twice as large (data files and associated indexes).

    -   Strange checksums in the screen files that made it
        impossible to clone a file by renaming it unless you
        bought the extra cost utility from Small Computer (I
        think they've bundled this now).

Bill
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