FoxPro

File:FoxPro 2.6 Developers Guide Cover.png

FoxPro is a text-based procedurally oriented programming language and database management system (DBMS), and it is also an object-oriented programming language, originally published by Fox Software and later by Microsoft, for MS-DOS, Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX. The final published release of FoxPro was 2.6. Development continued under the Visual FoxPro label, which in turn was discontinued in 2007.

Description

FoxPro was derived from FoxBase (Fox Software, Perrysburg, Ohio), which was in turn derived from dBase III (Ashton-Tate) and dBase II. dBase II was the first commercial version of a database program written by Wayne Ratliff, called Vulcan, running on CP/M, as does dBase II.{{citation |url=http://www.zorba.z80.de/misc.htm/ |title=a CP/M set released in 1982 |access-date=5 July 2020 |archive-date=24 December 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211224094147/http://www.zorba.z80.de/misc.htm |url-status=dead }}

FoxPro was both a DBMS and a relational database management system (RDBMS), since it extensively supported multiple relationships between multiple DBF files (tables). However, it lacked transactional processing.

FoxPro was sold and supported by Microsoft after they acquired Fox Software in its entirety in 1992. At that time there was an active worldwide community of FoxPro users and programmers. FoxPro 2.6 for UNIX (FPU26) has even been successfully installed on Linux and FreeBSD using the Intel Binary Compatibility Standard (ibcs2) support library.

Reception

Tom Campbell of Compute! in 1993 praised FoxPro's rapid application development: "You can create a complete database browser with a mousing, menuing interface in well under 100 lines--including a custom data entry screen with error checking". He concluded that the $1000 price for FoxPro and runtime library was "without a doubt" worthwhile, as it "could mean that you'll make that $1,000 back--on your first job".{{Cite magazine |last=Campbell |first=Tom |date=February 1993 |title=Using FoxPro |url=https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue149/66_Using_FoxPro.php |access-date=2025-03-10 |magazine=Compute! |page=66 |issue=149}}

Version information

= Operating system compatibility =

class="wikitable" style="font-size: 90%; text-align: left; " \|+Extant Versions by OS
Version ! FP 2.0 ! FP 2.5 ! FP 2.6
MS-DOS \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yes \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yes \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yes
Windows 3.1 to 7 Ultimate sp1 \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yes \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yes \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yes
Macintosh \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yes \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yes \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yes
SCO UNIX \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yes \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yes \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yes
Linux and FreeBSD \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yes \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yes \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yesusing the ibcs files from the {{SourceForge\|linux-abi\|Linux ABI}}
Windows 2000 \| style="background:#fcc; text-align:center;"\| No \| style="background:#fcc; text-align:center;"\| No \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yes
Windows 7,8,10 32 bit \| style="background:#fcc; text-align:center;"\| No \| style="background:#fcc; text-align:center;"\| No \| style="background:#9f9; text-align:center;"\| Yes

class="wikitable" style="font-size: 90%; text-align: left; "

|+Extant Versions by OS

Version

! FP 2.0

! FP 2.5

! FP 2.6

MS-DOS