Visual FoxPro is quite capable in almost all aspects, except for application deployment – according to Microsoft, you may only deploy your applications to Windows systems. Feeling somewhat limited by this situation, I discovered Python, an open­source programming language that is a compelling choice for seasoned Visual FoxPro developers – and it runs on multiple platforms! In this article, I'll introduce you to Python, and show you how to access Visual FoxPro data with it. Many Visual FoxPro developers feel that their choices of development environments are effectively limited to Visual FoxPro or .NET – Visual FoxPro because that is what they know, and .NET because it is compelling, capable, and rich with features and an astronomical advertising budget. Both of these options link against the Windows GUI, and are therefore limited to running on the Windows platform (unless you want to use a workaround such as Wine or a virtual machine such as Win4Lin or VMWare). This limitation is obviously by design. Other languages and development environments exist, separate from .NET, such as the various flavors of C, C++, and Java, that are multiplatform­capable, but in my quest for a multiplatform programming language, one rose to the top precisely because of its similarities in lots of ways to the experience of programming in FoxPro. I'd like to share what I've learned about Python, and how this knowledge may apply vis­a­vis Visual FoxPro.Python is an interpreted language with an elegant and readable syntax, and like Visual FoxPro you can mix­and­match OOP with functional programming, all variables are in effect variants, and there is a strong and flexible ­but quite different­ data model. Python consists of the core modules and is augmented by additional modules contributed by developers all over the world.

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