Re: [open-cobol-list] optional ecosystem for OC, Second thoughts on Java etc

[Patrick]

> In many years of writing COBOL the only time I have needed or
> used subordinate libraries is in a situation where a fancy gui
> window was needed. Tiny Cobol has an example or two of calling
> e.g, Tcl/tk. The COBOL data entry window is pretty bare bones
> whether done with SCREEN statements or individual DISPLAY/ACCEPT
> pairs.
>
> OTOH The basic Linux or other *nix utilities are very useful. I call
> them using a CALL SYSTEM USING "ls -l>listing" type statement.
>
> For an interface to scientific instrumentation perhaps ADA would be
> useful. I have never used it.
>    
Hi John

Thanks for this email and the tree data one too. Yes I think I am all 
set now with the substitute command and friends such as trim, string and 
unstring.

With Cobol's fine grained variable control, I think i could even make a 
web input sanitizer quite easily.

I have had a rough go with Ada. I have 53lbs of Ada books now and have 
read all buy a 0.3 lbs of them, yet I still have accomplished very 
little with the language.

It is quite time consuming to interface with other languages, it is not 
very portable and in the floss world it is completely controlled by 
Adacore. Adacore offers several libraries but they are GPL and at the 
time I didn't want to use GPL. The GNAT compiler integrated into GCC is 
okay but it is the least up to date between their offerings of GNAT GCC 
, GPL GNAT(the runtime dictates your code will be GPL) and their $20K 
version GNAT Pro.

The language itself is absolutely wonderful, it's just that all that 
wonderfulness comes at the price of a very difficult to implement 
language and a dependency on those that can maintain enormous compilers 
and complex runtimes.

OC on the other hand is so much smaller and integrates easily with C.

Have a great day-Patrick