[Info-vax] Free Pascal for VMS ?

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

Den 2018-05-09 kl. 04:36, skrev Arne Vajhøj:
> On 5/8/2018 8:50 PM, Richard Maher wrote:
>> On 08-May-18 11:34 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> Software development on VMS definitely need to move to OO.
>>>
>>> But I don't know if OOifying VMS Pascal is a good thing.
>>>
>>> I love Pascal as a language, but it is not a language with a
>>> great future ahead.
>>>
>>> Existing VMS Pascal ported to VMS x86-64 would enable
>>> existing Pascal applications to move over.
>>>
>>> And I believe that port is needed.
>>>
>>> But I do not see a large number of new OO based
>>> applications pick Pascal if VMS Pascal is extended
>>> to support Object Pascal.
>>>
>>> It has not happened on other platforms.
>>>
>>> FPC is quite popular, but not for new business. For
>>> keeping old stuff running and for hobby usage by all
>>> those developers growing up with TP/BP/Delphi.
>>>
>>> And in general I am a bit skeptical about shoehorning
>>> new paradigms into old languages - usually new languages
>>> designed for the paradigm works better.
>>>
>>> C++, Java, C#, Kotlin, Scala, Ruby etc. will probably work
>>> better than Object Pascal, Ada 95, OO Cobol etc..
>>
>> Python, Nodejs should be portable?
> 
> I believe that it does take some work to keep Python running
> on VMS. Anyway I see Pythons role on VMS more as scripting
> than GP language.
> 
> V8 is not available on VMS as far as I know, so node.js would
> need another JS engine. Supposedly it is possible to run
> node.js on Rhino and Nashorn, so maybe it will work.
> 
>> But as I said for *many* years getting 3GLs to return JSON data should be 
>> the low-hanging fruit. A cross between WASD and Tier3 would be idyllic.
> 
> If you include JVM languages, CLR languages, PHP etc. as 3GL then
> many of them have it builtin.
> 
> If you mean traditional native procedural languages then
> some external library is needed but they exist.
> 
> https://www.json.org/ list libraries for Ada, C and Fortran.
> 
> Most likely one of the C libraries will be possible
> to use from Pascal, Basic and Cobol.
> 
> Arne
> 
> 

In a current project we have a need to interface to a new server that
presents some REST APIs using JSON data in and out. Instead of trying
to do this from our main Cobol code, we wrote this in Python scripts.
Works very well and the development time is rather short and we got
Python examples from the server maintainer.

The "interface" between the main Cobol code (old applications that
gets some updates) and Python is through tables and triggers in Rdb.
The Cobol code inserts something in a table and a trigger submits a
batch job where the Python processing (doing the REST calls and
inserting the result into Rdb) is done.

The alternative would had been to write REST/JSON calls from C using
some library and link that to the Cobol appliations. We think that
we got a way shorter develop time by using Python and easier to
maintain and test.