[Info-vax] Free Pascal for VMS ?

[Richard Maher]

On 09-May-18 2:59 PM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 

No offense, but I don't think your "interface" should be standardized or 
recommended by VSI.

I don't know what plug in needs to be written to Apache/WASD to say to 
run up EXEs in an AppPool rather than Python/PerlCGI but it can't be 
impossible?