British languages specialist Harlequin Ltd, Cambridge, which has moved its US operation to Cambridge, Massachusetts (from Salem, New Hampshire), was on hand to show off its wares at last week’s ObjectWorld ’93 event in Boston. The company’s core product is its object-oriented LispWorks development environment. Other packages, such as KnowledgeWorks – for designing and building knowledge-based systems – are built on top of LispWorks. The current flagship product is HyperQuery, a graphical front-end database access mechanism that uses English language-like commands on top of SQL and has been implemented for the Informix, Ingres, Oracle, Sybase and Unify databases. European and Japanese language versions of the environment are planned and its application programming interface enables developers to integrate HyperQuery with external applications written in C or C++. HyperQuery runs under OSF/Motif on Unix machines, Microsoft Corp Windows, and is NT ready, according to the company. Harlequin says it has a range of tailored data presentation applications such as Watson – for criminal investigations (but he was no good at it…) – and also a crew rostering system.
