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Rich Language and Compilers

The core of any development environment is its language, and its compiler. Clarion provides the best quality of both, plus provides the additional tools necessary to visually design applications and to deploy applications to other platforms.

The Clarion Language

Clarion is a fourth generation language featuring data types and structures for tables, rows, windows, window controls, and reports. In other words, the language and compiler are inherently data aware, and have built-in structures for windows, reports, linked-lists, hash tables, etc.

Clarion provides for a rich variety of data types, and also features soft typing (so that the developer doesn't have to cast a value when converting from one type to another). The Clarion language can be said to be "descended" from COBOL, BASIC and JP/1. Developers with knowledge of any of these will have no problem understanding Clarion code.

Clarion also includes a data-centric application framework called the Application Builder Classes.

Each Clarion program includes a data and code section. Clarion processes a window via the "ACCEPT" loop. The application opens a window, cycles through the Accept loop, detects end user interaction, and "accepts" the action from the end user.

The following, therefore, represents a complete Clarion application which opens a window, displays a control with "Hello World!," and provides for a button to close the application:

PROGRAM
MAP
END

MyWindow    WINDOW('My Caption'),AT(,,185,92),FONT('Arial',9,,FONT:regular),GRAY
              BUTTON('OK'),AT(144,10,35,14),USE(?OkButton),DEFAULT
              STRING('Hello World!'),AT(17,39),USE(?String1)
            END

CODE

OPEN(MyWindow)
ACCEPT
CASE FIELD()
    OF ?OkButton
      CLOSE(MyWindow)
    END
END

The "bottom line" for the developer is that the language is easy to learn, well documented, and powerful.

Compilers and the Development Environment Tools

The Clarion compiler is descended from the TopSpeed family of compilers, noted for creating tight, fast executables. Clarion applications are machine code executables. A complete application including file driver support (shipped as a dyna link library), executable and dyna link function library can be as small as 1.5MB, though typically full applications will be around three to four megabytes. An option within the project system allows developers to create "one piece" executables, should the developer wish to ship the program as a single binary file instead of an .exe file and the .dll's. Applications are royalty free.

The illustration below shows the results of the compiler on "Hello World!"

Clarion includes compilers for C++ and Modula-2, allowing for easy creation and management of mixed language projects. Clarion can also prototype C function calls and call the functions from within a Clarion language program.

The development environment features formatters for designing windows and reports, a code editor, project system management, and other tools for creating the elements of your application. Click here to learn more about the development environment tools.

The Clarion Language

Development Environment

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