[open-cobol-list] PASSTHROUGH experiment

[Patrick]

Hi Everyone

So for 8 years I have been teaching myself to program in the evenings 
after the kids go to bed(I service spectrometers in the day) and for 8 
years I have been littering the internet with stupid questions. I have 
failed and failed and failed but I have also learned quite a bit in the 
process.

So I have been looking at the OC source code and I am very excited. All 
the C books I have read seem to make sense now and all the compiler 
books seem to be making sense now too.

It will take me another month of evenings to understand the source code 
but I can see it is built from standard components like Autotools, Flex 
and Bison, there is lot of documentation to help outside of the OC project.

I was investigating gobject introspection in order to write a GTK 
binding but now I have another idea. What about modifying open Cobol 
itself to pass through certain variables directly to C skipping the 
normal checks an stuff.

So lets say that there is a C library that has the function POO and I 
want to pass the value 2 and a user defined C type FOO. Right now there 
is no way to represent FOO in OC or it is difficult.

What about something like this:

05 FOO PIC PASSTHROUGH .

or if the C library uses some crazy name, a way to rename it on the 
Cobol side but emitted correctly on the C side

05 crazy PIC PASSTHROUGH VALUE SomeCrazyNameInC.


Aside from modifying Cobol outside of the standard does anyone see any 
issues with this approach?