gnubol: isolating INTERNET DIVISION

[RKRayhawk@aol.com]

Thanks to Glen Glen Colbert for ESQL attachment postings., a useful study in 
itself.

Incidentally, thanks for making it a .TXT file. That practice, intentional or 
not, actually helps prevent viruses, because such files are unlikely to come 
alive (in contrast to say a .DOC file).

Please permit this cross post of ideas, for actual extension of COBOL within 
GNU projects.

I recommend a special internet division, with clearly labeled sections.  This 
will permit distinct parser(s) for those sections.  Generally these must be 
rip and tear extensions that could be suppressed by conservative users.  
Anyway, I suggest ...

INTERNET DIVISION.
HTML SECTION.
    <yada_yada> wonderments of all sorts
    </yada_yada>
XML SECTION.
    !DTD...
SQL SECTION.
    DEFINE CURSOR ...


Such sectioning will allow isolation of syntax curiosities, and possibly 
provide for 'borrowing'  other GNU successes. The DIVISION will allow further 
compartmentalization, and possibly fairly easy high level suppression.

(I know that SQL is not strictly internet per se.  But I am lumping it here 
for the exact purpose of isolation.  Of these three, SQL is the one must 
likely to need yet more facilitation in the procedure division. So, also to 
help set a concept in place, I would suggest the idea that an SQL SECTION 
_also_ be permitted _in_the_procedure_division.)

The SQL section would have to have paragraphs (let's say), and invocation 
would be something like 
  PERFORM yada-dee-yada-paragraph IN SQL.
  PERFORM yada-dee-yada-paragraph OF SQL.


Such broad strokes should leave us room to experiment, and to rip out 
anything that is not  for early release, or which users want to build without.

Thus one important guidelines for preprocessors and parsers, is that language 
defined section names from the archaic period can not be used as section 
names in the procedure division, but certain hyper modern section names can 
(an in some cases must) be used in the procedure division. WIth the suggested 
concept we also need a mechanism to prevent fall through of a SQL procedure 
division section, and a perform x thru y can not mix procedure types (now 
ain't that fun!).  One possible way to do that is to say that you are not 
even allowed to PERFORM SQL section, but only its paragraphs, those 
paragraphs would be of the type SQL-type....

At this stage in life on planet earth it would be pretty far fetch say that 
HTML is not COmmon or not Busines Oriented Language scripting. I personnaly 
believe that XML is the single most important evolution of the next for shops 
that have mainframe data repositories. But this note is not intended as 
advocacy, just an idea of how to isolate experimentation.

Best Wishes
Bob Rayhawk
RKRayhawk@aol.com            

--
This message was sent through the gnu-cobol mailing list.  To remove yourself
from this mailing list, send a message to majordomo@lusars.net with the
words "unsubscribe gnu-cobol" in the message body.  For more information on
the GNU COBOL project, send mail to gnu-cobol-owner@lusars.net.