[Info-vax] Free Pascal for VMS ?

[Richard Maher]

On 10-May-18 6:14 PM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
> Den 2018-05-10 kl. 03:25, skrev 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.
>> 
> 
> Not sure of what "interface" you are refering to. Our Python based 
> interface? Or the fact that the server designer (out of our control) 
> selected a REST/JSON interface?
> 
> Our solution was the best with the tools at hand. I do not expect
> this to become any "standard" from VSI. And even if VSI didn't
> directly recommend the solution, they agreed that it was probably the
> best given the circumstances.
> 
>> 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?
> 
> Not sure what you are saying here, or how it relates to our project. 
> Our VMS system is the client and the REST/JSON server runs on Linux. 
> How does Apache/WASD help here? There are no calls inbound to VMS.

My bad. I thought VMS was the server.