XCMD Text Jig
Volume Number: 7
Issue Number: 2
Column Tag: abc
Related Info: File Mgr (PBxxx)
Towards A Test Jig for XCMDs
By Bob Gordon, Minneapolis, MN
jig n. A device for guiding a tool or for holding machine work in place.
I must have been lucky--the first time I ran my first XCMD it worked.
Admittedly, it was not complete, but it did do more or less what it was supposed to do.
Subsequently I have worked on several other XCMDs with much less success. Running
them yielded various interesting crashes, which were impossible to deal with from
FoxBase.
A Small Aside About FoxBase
FoxBase is a database package and language available for the Macintosh from Fox
Software of Toledo, Ohio, of all places. It is highly compatible with dBase III and
FoxBase on MS-DOS machines. That is, I suppose, useful in some cases. The really nice
things about FoxBase on the Mac are the development environment and its speed. The
Fox people have extended the language and provided the tools to make it possible to
develop Mac-like applications with relative ease. It is possible to fairly rapidly bring
up a custom database application with multiple screens (FoxBase in its current
incarnation does not have scrolling windows. This has not been a serious problem.),
menus, a variety of reports, full control of fonts, styles and sizes, etc. Speed of database
functions seems to be a Fox tradition. For a while, FoxBase was overwhelmingly the
fastest database package available on the Mac. Now it may be simply the fastest. These
days I do most of my programming in FoxBase primarily because my clients are
interested in having a working program in a short time.