Meaning of . CH in the Clipper and ADVPL languages?

Question

When we use a language like Clipper or ADVPL, we usually use libraries (includes) .CH, I STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS.

In C language, these header files have the suffix . H, which means Header File.

I believe it should be Custom Header File or Clipper Header File, but I’m not sure yet.

So what is the real meaning of the acronym?

Answer 1

That is correct.

Knows the .h of C, right? That is, the header file with presets of what will be useful for the code itself of the language? It’s the same thing only that is of ADVPL.

That one C is by Clipper, the language that gave rise to the ADVPL, so it is not a creation of the ADVPL itself but legacy of the Clipper. It was adopted precisely so as not to confuse with the .h C, something that the Clipper developers worked hard on and even other Clipper users used. We used to do a lot of C stuff with the Clipper.

In fact some people at Totvs prefer to adopt as Custom to get away from the Clipper, but neither is it a correct meaning for what it is in fact.

I didn’t find anything that documents officially, but I remember this on the Clipper. It doesn’t matter much what the C in the acronym means yes to what the file serves.

Although nothing prevents you from putting anything on .CH in general nothing is put that is considered the language itself. In fact in Clipper/Harbour/ADVPL this is even a little different from C. In C these things are not part of the language and the preprocessor is quite "dumb", it only exchanges texts without further analysis.

In these languages called xbase the preprocessor is much more powerful, it understands the code better and does more than just exchange text. So we can even consider as part of the language.

I don’t know if anything has changed, but a while ago the ADVPL’s preprocessor was a little lower than the Clipper’s in some specific points. Harbour’s is extremely powerful and you can do some incredible things, you can abuse it a lot. Although most only use for the same basic. In Harbour becomes a nearly complete metaprogramming feature.