[Info-vax] JSON, was: Re: First ship poll: When will the first native x86-64 compilers ship ?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 4/18/2022 4:35 AM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
> Den 2022-04-18 kl. 01:27, skrev Arne Vajhøj:
>> On 4/17/2022 6:55 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> Having said that, I do think that sometimes people do go overboard in
>>> using whatever is the fashion of the month instead of just a nice simple
>>> parser that maybe just builds an object tree that you can iterate 
>>> through
>>> to extract the data you need.
>>
>> If you use JSON then you do not need to write that parser but can
>> just pick one and use it - for almost all languages - and for
>> the more popular languages there are multiple parsers to choose from.
> 
> We have some Cobol cases where the data sent to "the other side"
> was defined as JSON. The structure was fixed and the data parts
> all had known and fixed sizes (or could be blank filled), so it
> was easy enough to define the JSON structure as a Cobol record
> with variables for the data parts and just "fill-in-the-blanks".
> 
> I guess that you could call that "a astring". With a special format
> but still a (kind of) string.
> 
> For some cases (the recevier requested UUID version 4 while VMS
> only supports Version 1), so we used Python and the JSON support
> it has. On the communication channel (an MQ queue) it is still
> a string of characters.
> 
> And in another case we got an XML structure, but it had a very
> well known format so the data we needed could just be fetched
> from well know positions in that "XML string".
> 
> So you can very well use JSON or XML *in specific cases*
> without the fancy parsers.
> 
> I'm not against parsers, of course. In another case we receive
> a large and very dynamic XML structure and there the parsing
> and looping constructs in Python was very handy to read it.

A parser that actually understand the rules of JSON/XML is
way more robust than a hack.

But obviously one need to do what one need to do. There are
no free JSON parser/generator for Cobol listed at json.org (one
commercial though).

Especially XML can be tricky.

3 years ago for another thread I created this monstrosity:

<a xmlns:df='http://df2'><b 
xmlns='http://df1'><x><![CDATA[ABC<x></x>]]></x></b><c 
xmlns='http://df2'><x><![CDATA[DEF<x></x>]]></x></c><c 
xmlns='http://df3'><x><![CDATA[GHI<x></x>]]></x></c><df:c><df:x><![CDATA[JKL<x></x>]]></df:x></df:c></a>

Arne