[open-cobol-list] Re: [Tiny-cobol-users] open-cobol-0.9.6

[David Essex]

At 09:45 PM 12/06/02 +0900, Keisuke Nishida wrote:

> ...
> At the moment, OpenCOBOL lacks many facilities that TinyCOBOL
> has, including SORT/MERGE statements, intrinsic functions,
> SCREEN SECTION, embedded SQL, and GDB supports.  
> ...
> Still I think it would be great if we could share some 
> ideas and resources (like test suite), as we both have 
> the same goal: implementing an open-source COBOL compiler.
> ....

Yes, I agree there should be more cooperation not only between open-COBOL
and TC, but with cobol4gcc also.

Unfortunately this is easier said than done.

Some areas where I would like to see more cooperation are the following.

- The NIST test suite
- SORT/MERGE utility
  (Some thing like CA-So*t, Syncs*rt, ...)
- Indexed/Relative file utility 
  (ISAM, C-IS*M to the Xopen standard with file locks etc.)

In my view the above are relatively independent projects which could easily
be shared between projects.

For example both the SORT/MERGE and indexed/Relative file utilities could
be used as a stand alone program or as a library used by any of the
projects run-time.

As for the embedded SQL pre-processor for COBOL, this is also a separate
project, a rather large project.

The problem here is that each database has a different internal API. So to
create a generic SQL pre-processor in my view is not realistic. 

Yes, one could use ODBC, but there some performance issues there.

Also most commercial database vendors do include a SQL pre-processor with
the database.

As for open source database, to my knowledge Firebird it is the only one
which has a COBOL SQL pre-processor.

PostgreSQL has C SQL pre-processor, which could be used as a starting point
to create one for COBOL.

MySQL does not have any SQL pre-processors, so embedded SQL is not
supported. Unless some one made one as an add on product.

Anyway my 2 cents worth.






David Essex