Re: [EXTERNAL] SQL RPG and Web API Consumption

"Technically possible" yes - but sadly even if the resources were not limited it is not that simple.

Within IBM there is a COBOL Council and basically if one COBOL compiler wants to implement a new non-ANSI feature it has to get permission from the council to do so. The first thing you have to show is that nothing you are doing (in syntactic terms) will cause issues with any potential future ANSI enhancements. Then you have to demonstrate why your customers need the enhancement. Just to give you an idea of the process I spent well over a year battling to get one simple such enhancement in COBOL/400. it was the LIKE data definition keyword if anyone cares.

These days it is a little simpler I understand but the development effort is trivial compared with the rest of the work.

I worked on COBOL and RPG compiler architectures for several years and RPG was SO much simpler to get things done!


Jon P.

On Feb 10, 2022, at 1:23 PM, John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 11:33 AM Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The biggest problem with using any RPG oriented Service program routines (such as HTTPAPI) is that COBOL does not have an equivalent to prototyping. [...]

It can all be done but it can be painful.

That answers my question about the level of support COBOL has for
calling arbitrary ILE modules. (More than none, but not as much as
RPG.)

It sounds like it would be technically possible for IBM to evolve its
ILE COBOL so that it has prototypes, but that would require more
resources than is justified by the demand.

From what you describe, I could also imagine an enterprising and
motivated third party (not me) building something to bridge the gap
(perhaps a code-generating preprocessor). Again, it would take a lot
of work and probably a lot of cleverness, and I don't expect anyone
wants it badly enough (or sees enough of a market for it) to make it
happen.

John Y.
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