Clarion (programming language)

<h2 id="history">History</h2>
<p>The first release of the Clarion language was a DOS product named Clarion 1.0 and was first released in April 1986. Clarion was created by Bruce Barrington, one of the founders of healthcare firm "HBO & Company" (later acquired by <a href="/facts/McKesson_Corporation/SVob9KRa">McKesson Corporation</a>,<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:1" href="#fn:1"><sup>1</sup></a>) and a small team of developers. Barrington's goal was to create a language that would be compact and expressive, and would maximize the use of the memory-mapped screen of the IBM PC by creating a screen designer. Version 1 produced <a href="/facts/Pseudocode/XgN19duK">pseudocode</a>; the initial release included a screen designer, an interpreter, an editor, and a debugger. Initially it supported databases composed of DAT files which was Clarion’s proprietary ISAM file format. Bruce Barrington formed Barrington Systems and released version 1.0. 
</p><p>In 1991 Barrington licensed compiler technology from a company named Jensen & Partners International (JPI). JPI was founded in 1987 by Niels Jensen, who had earlier (1979 or 1981) been one of the founders of <a href="/facts/Borland/crI5pTzW">Borland</a>. <a href="/facts/Philippe_Kahn/kMWE12Ah">Philippe Kahn</a> was the marketing person who built Borland around the $49 <a href="/facts/Turbo_Pascal/2aWFEk9z">Turbo Pascal</a> compiler. Niels and his team were working on a new compiler technology at Borland when Kahn decided to buy Wizard C, and name it Turbo C. Niels and several other developers left Borland and started JPI, where they continued to work on their compiler technology, named TopSpeed, which they bought from Borland for $1.7 million.
</p><p>During this time the relationship between Clarion Software and JPI grew closer, and on April 30, 1992, Clarion merged with JPI to form an entity which would eventually be named TopSpeed Corporation. Employees at the TopSpeed Development Centre in London went to work on CDD and resolved many of the bugs.
</p><p>Clarion 11.1 is the current release, build 13788, which was released in February 2022. 
</p><p>As of August 2023, A Clarion 12 release is expected by the community, but so far there is no official comments on confirmed future features.
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<h2 id="notability">Notability</h2>
<p>Clarion is historically known as being one of the first 4GL computer programming tools, first developed in the 1980s.
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<h2 id="external-links">External links</h2>
<ul><li><a href="http://www.softvelocity.com">Official website</a>, SoftVelocity</li></ul>

<h2 id="references">References</h2>

<ol>
<li id="fn:1"><p>"Health Care Services Leader McKesson's History: Our History". McKesson. Archived from the original on 2012-03-13. Retrieved 2012-03-14. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120313161739/http://www.mckesson.com/en_us/McKesson.com/About+Us/Our+Company/Our+History.html" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20120313161739/http://www.mckesson.com/en_us/McKesson.com/About+Us/Our+Company/Our+History.html</a> <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li>
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Clarion (programming language) open-in-new

Clarion (programming language)