COBOL PRECOMPILER for PostGreSQL
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<font size="4" face="Courier New">Hello,<br>
<br>
I'm working with the opensource GNUCOBOL project. One of our
efforts is to provide a migration path for organizations to move
from commercial COBOL compilers to GNUCOBOL. One of the
impediments to this migration is to move from an Oracle or IBM
RDBMS solution to PostGreSQL. Most organizations are using one of
these RDBMS solutions with COBOL precompilers supplied by the
vendor and have embedded SQL in their source code. This represents
a significant challenge to any migration as there is not a COBOL
precompiler for PostGreSQL.<br>
<br>
I would like to propose that the ECPG precompiler for C, to be
modified to accept either C or COBOL. Another option would be to
clone ECPG to work with the COBOL language. For the most of the
COBOL variable types it should not be too difficult to convert
them to C variables which would reduce the effort. Both of these
RDBMS use the syntax similar to C, EXEC SQL ..... END-EXEC, where
text between them is the actual SQL statement or variables.<br>
<br>
Thanks for your consideration,<br>
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<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><font
face="Monotype Corsiva, cursive"><font style="font-size: 18pt"
size="5"><span style="background: #ffffa6">Chuck
Haatvedt</span></font></font></p>
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style="font-size: 14pt" size="4"><span
style="background: #ffffa6"><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:chuck.haatvedt@gmail.com">chuck.haatvedt@gmail.com</a></span></font></font></p>
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Chuck Haatvedt <chuck.haatvedt@gmail.com> writes:
I would like to propose that the ECPG precompiler for C, to be
modified to accept either C or COBOL. Another option would be to
clone ECPG to work with the COBOL language.
The latter option seems much more likely to succeed than the former.
Either way, however, I'd guess that the amount of COBOL expertise
in the existing Postgres community is not distinguishable from zero.
So "proposing" this is not going to make it happen. If you want to
step up with a patch, then maybe, but even then I'm not sure we'd
want to commit to maintaining it as part of the core PG project.
The most likely path to success is to plan on creating an ECPG
fork maintained separately by interested people.
FWIW, the only reason ECPG is part of our core distro is that
years ago it used to require significant manual effort to keep it
up to date with core grammar changes. Since we invented a process
for auto-generating the ECPG grammar from the core grammar, it's
seemed like maybe ECPG could be kept at arm's length after all,
though we've not seriously tried to push it out as a separate
project. We could talk about what additional stuff might be
needed in that infrastructure to make it work for a COBOL wrapper
... but I think somebody else has to take point on making that
happen.
regards, tom lane