[andrewf]

> Bizarrely, to protect dBase, there was no compatible Turbo C++ objects integration in dBase (you could import OBJ files from Microsoft C++). There was no way to natively use dBase from Turbo C++ or TurboPascal.

I'm guessing dBase was itself built using Microsoft's compilers, so pulling in other code from the same compiler was plausible. Not a product choice re: the Turbo compilers, just a disjoint path dependency between two acquired product lines (Ashton-Tate's dBase, and Wizard C).

This is the reason that Clipper, a third-party dBase compiler, could only link against .OBJs from particular versions of Microsoft C. Clipper compiles to p-code whose interpreter is implemented in Microsoft C; "linking" a Clipper program is actually linking a Microsoft C program with a static array comprising the Clipper compiler's output. So you can mix in a .OBJ expecting that version of the Microsoft C runtime library. Not a .OBJ expecting the Turbo C++ runtime library.