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

[David Essex]

At 01:47 PM 13/06/02 +0900, Keisuke Nishida wrote:

> At Wed, 12 Jun 2002 15:40:17 -0400, David Essex wrote:
> ... 
>> In my view the above are relatively independent projects which could easily
>> be shared between projects.
> ...
> Right.  Should we start a new project, like cobol-utils, which
> shares common utilities, libraries, and test suites?

Sounds OK to me.

Perhaps one could think of this as a group of projects under the same banner.

If no one objects, I think the first utility should be the NIST test suite.

And the second should be some kind of Indexed/Relative file utility and
library.


>> 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.
>
> I do not think performance is a big issue at this moment.
> Having a generic interface that works is better than nothing.
> We can improve the interface when performance really become
> an issue.
>
> Many databases seem to support ODBC on Linux already.  What
> about having a preprocessor and a run-time library that
> support ODBC?

There are at least 2 ODBC projects distributed under the GPL. So part of
the work is done.

But that still leaves the SQL parser/scanner, no small project.

Perhaps it would be easier to adapt an existing open source C SQL
preprocessor to COBOL. 

The only one I know of is PostgreSQL, but it is distributed under the
Berkeley license.





David Essex