[Info-vax] Any Way to Pass Arrays of Strings from C to Basic?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 11/7/2019 11:36 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 11/7/2019 11:40 AM, seasoned_geek wrote:
>> Accenture and The Gartner Group whispering into the ears of upper
>> management declared BASIC "non-strategic".
> 
> I've never seen anything that justified these people (Gartner) claiming 
> to have any worthwhile knowledge.  Well, perhaps the knowledge to 
> separate people and their money.
> 
> I'd really like to know just what they mean by "non-strategic" ?

To be migrated off long term.

>> The only portion which
>> needed to be in C was the piece which originally called Xerces XML
>> parser which was, at the time heavily supported by IBM. There was a
>> correct decision all XML parsing should be done by an industry
>> standard library.
> 
> A while back we looked at several XML parsers.  When done looking, we 
> looked at each other and basically said WTF?  The products would test 
> some XML for matching tag pairs, but nothing else we could see.  One 
> thing they didn't do was parse out the actual data that we needed. That, 
> we still had to custom program.  Have to wonder just what these 
> bloatware products are good for?  Nothing we could see or justify.

It should handle XML including all the special cases.

And it may additional validate against DTD or schema.

>> Xerces then got used by many other systems at the
>> company. Management didn't want a one-off roll-your-own parser they
>> would have to support for decades so it was a legitimate decision.
> 
> I'm guessing that they still had to have code to actually extract the data?

They would need to call something to get the data.

XPath is often very convenient for pulling data out of XML.

>> The only other real consideration was the mandate from upper
>> management that all messages have both guaranteed delivery and
>> guaranteed execution with throttle control. This mandated the tool
>> set of MQ Series feeding ACMS servers. No other tool set on the
>> platform could deliver that. Routing things to batch jobs meant data
>> could and would be lost as had happened in the past with other
>> systems.
> 
> Messaging is rather simple, but, it seems all anyone wants to do anymore 
> is find someone else's tool to do the job, regardless of fit.

Depends on what you need.

Durability, transactions, XA transactions, replication to DR site etc. 
can quickly make it very complex.

Arne