It's a candy mint and a breath mint. (Software Review) (dBASE IV may be an industry standard) (column) (evaluation)

It's a Candy Mint and a Breath Mint

I gave my first dBASE IV seminar at an introductory level last week, and I'm here to tell you that it's a fantastic product--if presently slightly rough. I'd forgotten a lot from the initial dog and pony show I saw more than a year ago, and it's been hard getting excited about the product after all the delays. But showing it to people who had never seen it gave me a fresh look.

It looks like dBASE IV will be the standard, at least for a while, since some people still automatically upgrade software. (Never mind the recurring nightmares that tech support people at big corporations have.) This thing is really hot for users who rely on ASSIST in dBASE III PLUS (a surprising number of them exist).

I learned that when someone asks a question about dBASE IV, the answer is almost always "Yes." dBASE IV is supposed to fulfill all of our wishes. Unfortunately, to have all the features I wanted, I have to take all the features you wanted too. That can be a problem, especially if one doesn't have a few megabytes of extra disk space, or enough extra RAM for a mammoth disk cache.

dBASE as produce

If …