Re: [open-cobol-list] User interaction preference.

[John R. Culleton]

On Wednesday 28 June 2006 23:20, Frank Swarbrick wrote:
> Kevin Monceaux wrote:
> > On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 09:17:39AM -0400, John R. Culleton wrote:
> >>So we need an on line interactive face for whatever language we choose.
> >>Let's assume right now Open Cobol. We can either have a one-language
> >>system or a two language system. For the one-language solution we have
> >> the SCREEN SECTION or the positioned ACCEPT and DISPLAY statements as in
> >> e.g., Ryan McFarland or many other variants. At this point Open Cobol
> >> doesn't provide either (or did I miss something?) And even the SCREEN
> >> SECTION doesn't do all that needs to be done, such as radio button
> >> selection.
> >
> > I occasionally check in on the progress of both Open COBOL and TinyCOBOL.
> > At the present time it seems that Open COBOL does some things better than
> > TinyCOBOL and vise versa.  Both would benefit greatly from an embedded
> > SQL pre-processor.  The logical solution to the user interface problem
> > would be for SCREEN SECTION functionality to be added to Open COBOL. 
> > But, until that happens TinyCOBOL does have SCREEN SECTION functionality.
> >  So, if one would like to do everything with one language(COBOL)
> > TinyCOBOL might be a good choice for the user interface portion of the
> > program.
>
> What COBOLs that you know of out there come with their own SQL
> pre-processor?  Seems to me you'd use the COBOL SQL pre-compiler that
> comes with your RDBMS.  Since each RDBMS has its own unique API I'm not
> sure how one could even have a generic SQL pre-processor.  Perhaps I'm
> missing something...
>
> Frank

IMO with indexed sequential file system and alternate keys the
Cobol user has less need of a RDBMS than others. For an interface
it would not be difficult to create a Cobol program that would
generate SQL statements which could then be processed against
the RDBMS via a script. This is of course a batch approach but
that is the familiar way of using Cobol. 

There is a little RDBMS with both a terminal interface and a
simplified C language API. It is called MDBMS (Marty's DBMS) and
is quite useful for small projects. 

I note that the web page is now down. I will write Marty and ask
him if I can redistribute the Linux package.

It hasn't been updated for years, but that just puts it in the
same position as Tiny Cobol, no more development but works as is
pretty well.  
-- 
John Culleton