[Info-vax] PostgreSQL (Re: open source OpenVMS (Re: Oracle-RDB seminar notes))

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2013-04-05 00:24:27 +0000, Bill Gunshannon said:

> In article <5cce1080-517e-40bc-bf57-7daad6f91956 at googlegroups.com>,
> 	BillPedersen <pedersen at ccsscorp.com> writes:
>> Actually, we do not care what language you use or even if you use a 
>> language.  If you have a favorite open source application written in 
>> any language we would be happy to help you and have your involvement.
>> We can also use people interested in helping spread the word, run 
>> tests, manage the VMS-Ports site.  Write wiki articles.  Many, many 
>> tasks besides programming and porting.
>> Yes, some of the major support efforts are in C and the CRTL is a major 
>> focus of issues.  Much of the open source software is written in C.  
>> But there are also open source applications written in Fortran, COBOL, 
>> Pascal and other languages. But knowledge of C is not required.
>> As far as transfer vectors they are alive and well and important to 
>> allow upgrades of sharable libraries to be done without impacting the 
>> executables calling them.  Recent work done as a part of some porting 
>> work has made the transfer vector mechanism nearly identical across all 
>> three architectures of OpenVMS.
>> Bill.
> 
> I would like to see the ones written in COBOL.  Got any pointers?  :-)

The transfer vectors (VAX) or symbol vectors (Alpha, Itanium) do not 
vary by language.   VAX uses a block of assembler, while Alpha and 
Itanium use linker directives.  (Sure, it would have been nice to add 
compatible linker directive to VAX, but the goal back then was to get 
to Alpha and to enhance and update Alpha. What VAX had with its 
transfer vectors worked, and was already in wide use.)

Various tools to build the vectors from common sources are available.  
I've linked to one earlier in this thread, and I suspect gnv has its 
own implementation.

As for a COBOL shareable image example, there's one available in the 
fine manual:

http://h30266.www3.hp.com/odl/vax/progtool/cobol57a/6297/6297_profile_005.html



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