[open-cobol-list] binding design patterns for OC

[Patrick]

Hi Everyone

This may be months away from becoming code but I am daydreaming about 
using libclang to create a binding generator for Open Cobol. The thing 
is, what good would it be if it didn't generate a sensible binding design.

Bindings are tough and there are a lot of considerations to take into 
account. I figure one of the most important ones is to do no harm. 
Namespace collisions ought to be high on the list of considerations, 
especially with auto-generated code.

Would this be sensible:

  Outer-Scope program

  Many nested programs each taking one record as an argument and return 
one record

  linkage section for Outer-Scope that takes one string,  one record 
and returns one record

  procedure division that has one big evaluate statement that calls the 
correct nested program and passes it the correct record

  End Outer-Scope


If each nested program took one record, that record could contain any 
number of parameters and they would not clutter the evaluate statement. 
The returning record could likewise contain a variety of parameters.

This binding could then be complied in to the user-developers 
application and the programs nested within the binding would  not 
collide with his/her application.

The call would look a little funny in that the C function name is an 
argument:

CALL "some-binding"
        USING BY CONTENT "some-function",
        USING BY VALUE some-record,
        RETURNING another-record  .


Any downsides to this or ways it could be improved? I thought I would 
try my hand at several manually written bindings before trying something 
automated.

Thanks for reading-Patrick