Where to find xHarbour docos

[JockMullin]

Hi, folks

I have been using xHarbour for awhile as a CL5 replacement and generally have had good success, but find the lack of documentation a bit of a problem especially when looking to use Harbour enhancements to the language.

I know about the online manual at xHarbour.com, but I was wondering if there are any NG or PDF versions available since I am a lowly dialup user and it's a pain to connect just to look up a function or whatever, besides I actually like to browse manuals in the bath or in bed. (Who says there isn't life after 60, eh?)

Pleased to hear if there is such a thing out there. Thanks.

Jock

 

[TonHu]

Grab the sources (archives) of xHarbour.org, and find most of it in dos\en and doc\es subdirs, but I'm afraid most of it is quite hopelessly old :-(
Ron did some work on the Hash* functions, and other C++-like extensions, but it's usually only essentials there...

HTH
TonHu

 

[JockMullin]

Hi, TonHu

OK, great, I will take a look at the source stuff - didn't occur to me to look there.

I guess it's understandable that the docs come last - everybody hates doing them (Real Programmers read source code (grin)). The newsgroup is great if you know what to search for, but that's often a case of knowing the answer before asking the question.

Thanks vm for your help.
Jock

 

[TonHu]

Hum, cough, getting the trial version of xHarbour.com does install a rater nice helpfile, so I heard recently... didn't check though ;-)
One of the features of the commercial version is the help & docs, they hired 2 ppl just for updating that.

HTH
TonHu

 

[JockMullin]

Hi, TonHu

Yeah, and of course I am way too noble and high-principled to ever exploit the good folks at xHarbour.com in that way (grin). And their online manual doesn't require any login, which is very decent of them. However I was unclear as to which extensions to the language were available in the public version.

In any case the point is moot because I have about convinced one of my custs to spring for the cost of the commercial version based on the incredible speed improvement we have seen in some tests of large batch jobs. A parallel run last week of importing 85000 orders from a csv file, indexing, pricing, postal editing and adding to a 500,000 record database took 18 minutes under xHarbour vs over four hours under clipper 5.3.

And a field-by-field comparison of the output files showed 0 differences. They were duly impressed. I was astounded.

Jock

 

[TonHu]

However I was unclear as to which extensions to the language were available in the public version.

The base compiler part of xHarbour is exactly the same in commercial and O.S. version, just the additional libraries (SQLRDD, OLE,...) tools (VXH, xBuild,...) and support (contractable) are the real differences. Only difference could be that most users use either Borland or Microsoft C++ compiler in O.S. version, where commercial version uses a (licenced?) PellesC C++ compiler. But that shouldn't have any impact on functionality.

The performance-gain over Cl5.3 I could have told you beforehand, guess you are running the DBFCDX RDD? ;-)

HTH
TonHu

 

[JockMullin]

Hi, TonHu

Thanks for clearing that up. I looked at the integrated environment in the commercial version and backed off in favour of the old familiar command line interface. I already had BCC and thus I could easily configure my own build script and keep my usual source editor (CEDT).

The parallel run I was discussing was DBFNTX, in fact it is an old Summer 87 app. I was pleasantly surprised how few changes were required to port it to xHarbour. The preprocessor does a great job, and in fact creating the .ppo files is a good way to update the code to CL5 function calls. Too bad it strips all the comments, tho.

I expected a performance improvement based on previous work with xHarbour, but 20 times was a surprise. The biggest part was in appending a delimited (CSV) file, which was previously extremely slow. I did encounter an incompatibility there whereby xHarbour doesn't allow commas within a field by using quotes, so I had to pre-process the csv file and convert embedded commas. Even with that overhead it was still so much quicker.

Jock

 

[TonHu]

Jock,

Glad the conversion was such a success!

I did encounter an incompatibility there whereby xHarbour doesn't allow commas within a field by using quotes, so...

I hope you'll report this bug in the newsgroups of xHarbour, then it'll be fixed probably soon, as lots of ppl use those functions... but not enough to have been found previously, or it has been ignored :-( I have developer access to CVS, so if I'm able in time and functionality (and quick enough), I'll try and put up a fix for that

HTH
TonHu