SheerPower

SheerPower - written Sheerpower in the vendor’s own material since roughly 2020, and SheerPower 4GL for most of its life - is a proprietary, free-of-charge programming language for Microsoft Windows, developed by Touch Technologies, Inc. of California. It reads like structured BASIC, it compiles rather than interprets, and it carries a complete record-oriented database engine and a web server inside the box. Its marketing slogan for the first decade was blunt about the family resemblance and the ambition at once: beyond BASIC.

It is also one of the more surprising survivals in the BASIC family. The language began life on OpenVMS as INTOUCH 4GL - documented at least as early as the 1992 copyright on its manual, and plausibly older given TTI’s 1982 founding, though no contemporaneous record of a first release survives - was carried across to Windows around the turn of the millennium, and is still being built today: the vendor’s download page advertised v11 build 30 as of 3 September 2026. Language catalogues that list SheerPower as dormant, and date it to the mid-2000s, are wrong on both counts.

History and Origins

Touch Technologies, Inc. (TTI) was founded in 1982 in San Diego. For its first fifteen years it was a Digital Equipment Corporation satellite business: its 1997 product catalogue lists Remote Device Facility for cross-DECnet disk and tape access, Dynamic Tape Accelerator, Dynamic Load Balancer Plus for automatic SYSGEN and working-set tuning, CleanDisk, a resold DECdocument and DECdecision, INTOUCH Networker Save and Restore - and, at the top of the page, INTOUCH 4GL, “the high performance 4GL for OpenVMS VAX and AXP”, with read/write access to RMS, Rdb, VAX DBMS and Oracle.

The INTOUCH manual that survives on OpenVMS mirror sites is revised 1 June 1995 and copyrighted 1992 and 1995. Its preface is the ancestor of every SheerPower preface since:

INTOUCH 4GL is a next generation database language for VAX and Alpha AXP computers. It includes a fourth-generation database language and an advanced development environment.

Swap “VAX and Alpha AXP computers” for “Windows”, and RMS for TTI’s own ARS engine, and you have the SheerPower manual almost verbatim. The Windows port is conventionally dated to 2000; the earliest documentary evidence is the 2001 start of the SheerPower guide’s copyright line and the first Internet Archive capture of sp4gl.com in August 2002, which already offers a “fully functional”, royalty-free download of under 3 MB for Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP.

The free-software-as-marketing posture was there from the beginning, and the FAQ of the day was refreshingly candid about it: “We give SheerPower 4GL to you for FREE as an exchange. We want your feedback, we want SheerPower 4GL to be used by lots of people, and we hope that over time people will buy our OPTIONAL SheerPower 4GL GOLD Licenses.” The GOLD licence bought priority support and the ability to hide source code by deploying a compressed, encrypted .SPRUN file. That distinction has since been dropped: the language is now advertised as free for every use, individual, non-profit and commercial alike, with paid support offered as a separate product.

The one moment SheerPower reached a wider audience was a press release of 7 July 2003 announcing V3.4, “SheerPower 4GL – Beyond BASIC”, which was carried by the trade wires and reportedly cross-posted into a number of Usenet groups.

Design Philosophy

The vendor states the design goal in negative terms, which is unusually clear-eyed for marketing copy:

Mainstream programming languages such as C and C++ were designed primarily to develop compilers, device drivers, and operating systems. In contrast, Sheerpower was designed to rapidly develop highly scalable business solutions.

Everything about the language follows from that. The unit of thought is a record in a file, not a byte in memory. Arrays are one-origin - the vendor calls it the “natural” indexing, where an array of three values is addressed 1, 2, 3. Identifiers are case-insensitive. There are no pointers, no manual allocation and no garbage collector - the vendor emphasises that the absence of GC means no “stop the world” pauses, an argument aimed squarely at people running interactive transaction systems. Errors surface immediately, interpreter-style, while the code is nevertheless compiled and optimised, which is exactly the trade-off INTOUCH advertised on VMS in 1995.

The other, more distinctive commitment is to decimal arithmetic. The “Perfect Precision” math package - covered by US patents 6,822,586 and 7,149,765, both filed on 12 March 2002 by Daniel Esbensen - exists so that 10.7 + 3.2 compares equal to 13.9, and so that money does not drift by a penny. TTI states the format carries 18 digits to the left of the decimal point and 16 to the right, 34 significant digits in all. This is the same reasoning that put fixed-point COMP-3 in COBOL and DECIMAL in PL/I, arrived at independently by a small vendor selling to accountants.

Key Features

• Structured BASIC syntax. print, line input, select case, do/loop, for/next, and routine ... end routine for subroutines. Comments begin with //. String variables carry the traditional $ suffix.
• A database engine in the language. ARS, the Advanced Record System, is bundled and addressed by dedicated statements rather than by a library API - open structure, extract structure ... include ... end extract - so a keyed scan over a table is ordinary control flow.
• ODBC as the escape hatch. Anything ARS does not cover is reachable through ODBC, and ARS itself can be exposed through ODBC to other applications.
• A bundled web server. SPINS (Sheerpower Internet Services) serves Sheerpower source files as scripts embedded in HTML, in the style of PHP or ASP; the vendor identifies V5.0 as the release that made this official.
• INPUT DIALOGBOX. GUI forms are described with a supported subset of HTML tags rather than with a widget toolkit.
• An interactive console and debugger. HALT drops into a console from which SHOW ALL, SHOW CALLS, SHOW FILES, STEP, STEP OVER, SET WATCH and LIST STATS are available, and execution can be resumed with GO after editing.
• Deployment as .SPRUN. Source can be compiled to a compressed, encrypted, text-safe stream for distribution; TTI states no decompiler exists or is planned.
• A small footprint. The installer is advertised as under 30 MB, installing in under two minutes - the 2002 download was under 3 MB.

A short program in the vendor’s own house style, from the language guide:

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do
   line input menu '"Calculator" = calc,"Command Prompt" = dos,"EXIT"': ans$
   if _exit then exit do
   select case ans$
   case 'CALC'
      pass nowait: 'calc'
   case 'DOS'
      pass nowait: '$$'
   end select
loop
end

And a database scan, showing the 4GL constructs that give the language its name:

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// Scan through vendors looking for a name "kind of like" a given name.
open structure vendor: name '@vendor', access outin
line input 'Enter part of a name', default 'gnve': scanfor$
scanfor$ = ucase$(scanfor$)
total = 0
extract structure vendor
   include scan(vendor(name), scanfor$) > 0
   print vendor(name); tab(30); vendor(phone); ' '; vendor(city)
   total = total + vendor(balance)
end extract
print using 'Total: $#,###,###': total
end

Performance Claims

Sheerpower’s marketing has always led with speed, and the numbers deserve to be labelled for what they are: vendor figures, published without a described benchmark, baseline, hardware or workload. The home page claims compilation “at rates of more than 500,000 source lines per second”, a bundled database reading “over 100,000 records per second with full record-level locking”, and a web server handling “thousands of transactions per second”; the FAQ separately quotes “in excess of 200,000 lines of code per second” for compiling source at run time. Both Wikipedia and Rosetta Code’s stub category page assert that ARS is “over 20 times faster than MySQL for shared read/write operations”; the sentence is flagged “citation needed” on Wikipedia, appears on neither TTI page that describes ARS, and comes with no methodology anywhere. The vendor’s own figures do not agree with each other either: the home page advertises “over 100,000” records per second while the ARS feature page calls “50,000 records per second” typical. The 2002 site claimed development speed-ups “as much as 500%”, and the manual “up to 80%” off the edit-compile-run-debug cycle.

None of these figures has, so far as the public record shows, been reproduced by an independent party. What can be said without qualification is that the design targets - a compiler small enough to run invisibly before every execution, an in-process record engine, no garbage collector - are the ones you would choose if these were your goals.

Evolution

Version numbering is the least tidy part of SheerPower’s history. The revision lines archived from the language guide read V4.5 in July 2002, V4.5 again in July 2003, V3.5 in February and June 2004, V4.0 in November 2005 and September 2006, V5.0 in November 2008 and October 2009, V6.0 in April 2015, and V10.0 in December 2020 - while the July 2003 press release announces V3.4. The safest reading is that manual-set numbering and product numbering diverged for several years in the mid-2000s; the broad shape, from a 3 MB Windows 98-era download in 2002 to a 64-bit installer for Windows 10, 11 and Server 2016 in the 2020s, is not in doubt.

The substantive changes over that span were the web-scripting layer and SPINS (around V5.0), the move to 64-bit, the retirement of the paid GOLD tier in favour of unconditional free licensing, the quiet dropping of “4GL” from the name, and support for editing in external editors such as Visual Studio Code alongside SPDEV.

Current Relevance

Sheerpower occupies a strange position: continuously developed, freely available, thoroughly documented - and almost entirely absent from the wider programming conversation. It has no package ecosystem, no conference, no GitHub organisation, no measurable presence in language-popularity indices, and a Rosetta Code category that has been a stub for years. Its Wikipedia article carries a promotional-tone banner. The user community that existed lived on a vendor-hosted forum that is no longer reachable.

What it has instead is a vendor that has shipped the same product line for four decades and a handful of production systems - E-Closing, LearnOnMobile, Kingdoms of the World and others on TTI’s “Built with Sheerpower” page - that keep it economically alive. Anyone evaluating it today should weigh that honestly: the language is a single-vendor, effectively Windows-only, closed-source proposition whose continued existence depends on one small California company. The only qualification TTI offers on that is an FAQ answer saying Sheerpower “can run under Linux using the WIN64 library” - that is, under a Windows compatibility layer, not as a native port.

Why It Matters

SheerPower is a well-preserved specimen of a category that dominated commercial computing in the 1980s and has almost entirely vanished: the proprietary 4GL, sold by a systems vendor as the fast path from a data model to a working business application. Its contemporaries - Progress 4GL, INFORMIX-4GL, Uniface, PowerBuilder, Clipper, Magic, and the many BASIC dialects that grew database verbs - solved the same problem the same way, by putting the file system into the grammar instead of behind an API.

It is also a small object lesson in software longevity. The preface of the 2026 manual is recognisably the preface of a 1995 OpenVMS manual, generated by the same DECdocument toolchain, describing a language whose core promise - immediate feedback, structured code, exact decimal money, and a database you do not have to install - has not changed in thirty years. Fashions in programming languages moved on several times over; SheerPower’s customers, apparently, did not need them to.