Well, I have no intention of making wonders with OnCmd but from what I've seen it does do what it was meant to do.
(I wasn't planning on using it for "production", just curious.)
Do you know if Base32 is available somewhere?
I'm not at all familiar with x2C or Watcom C, perhaps you could give some more info about what the "goal" would be?
The problem with ASCII only, means no extended characters whatsoever in the database itself or code, no graphic symbols when porting from old DOS code, no NLS characters in the data (no ð or þ for instance) not even accents, so no French é or Swedish ö or ligatures like æ. Since dBase and Clipper had no real problems with character sets in the database file this entirely artificial limitation sort of blew my mind when I bought a license in the late 90's, especially considering how good the rest of the code was, and how $#%!#$! expensive my triple target developers license was.
The gent behind Base32 disappeared around 2003, but I might have old contact info here somewhere, I was just thinking aloud since Martin was wandering if he should contact OnCMD, that tracking down the guy behind Base32 would be a better idea.
X2C is a dBase/Clipper/xBase compatible compiler that pumps out C code that is ready for compiling with a C compiler and would probably work with Watcom as is, as it outputs very clean C code but the current version has only been tested with Borland C++. Just a few modernisations to make it slightly less work to compile in one go and so on, might be all that is needed, it might even be as little as a few REXX scripts. Since the output code is a well defined C subset it might even be possible to merge it with one of the PD Mini C compilers into a program that compiles executables on its own.
You may also take a look at Harbour, it is similar to X2C with more modern syntax, however I think that the OS/2 port only works properly with IBM VAC++ and older versions of GNU C as back ends, neither of which is as user friendly as Watcom in eCS.
