Harbour (programming language)

Harbour is a programming language used mainly to create database and business programs. It is a modernised, cross-platform version of the older Clipper system, which itself grew out of the dBase database market of the 1980s and 1990s, and it is free and open-source software under a licence compatible with the GNU General Public License. Antonio Linares founded the Harbour project and implementation began in March 1999; the name is a play on Clipper, since a harbour is where ships dock and Harbour is a port of the Clipper language. In 2009 the system was substantially redesigned. Harbour extends the Clipper replaceable database drivers, adds object-oriented extensions with classes and inheritance based on Class(y) syntax, and offers a macro operator that compiles expressions at run time. The same compiler is available on Windows, Linux, several BSD systems, macOS, Android, iOS and other platforms.