What is Clipper?

Actually these days the official moniker is CA-Clipper. (This is just as well since the US Government and its contractors have appropriated the name "Clipper" to apply to an encryption scheme that has nothing to do with our programming language.)

Clipper is a programming language, and it is also a compiler. The programming language is a superset of dBASE III+, and also shares some features with C/C++ and Smalltalk. It is a general-purpose, high-level programming language well suited to corporate and commercial applications development.

CA-Clipper is also a compiler product marketed by Computer Associates, the second largest software vendor in the world today. The CA-Clipper compiler is (by definition) a fully conformant implementation of the CA-Clipper programming language for IBM-PC-type personal computers running DOS-like operating systems.

There are other Clipper implementations, from vendors other than Computer Associates, that have varying capabilities and run on platforms other than MS-DOS.