[open-cobol-list] "Mixed" COBOL applications

[Bill Klein]

Mostly just curious, but also as a follow-up to a thread in comp.lang.cobol

Has anyone tried a "mixed" COBOL application with OpenCOBOL, e.g.


A Micro Focus or Fujitsu *main* COBOL program calling an OpenCOBOL
subprogram?

You certainly would need both "run-times" available, but as the OpenCOBOL
subprogram should (I *think*) just look like any old "C" subprogram, I would
think this MIGHT work (but certainly don't know so).

  ***

The place that I suggest this was for a Fujitsu application that wanted a
"quick and easy" date validation routine.  OpenCOBOL has support for
FUNCTION TEST-DATE-YYYYMMDD, but Fujitsu doesn't.  Therefore, I was thinking
that it MIGHT be possible for the Fujitsu application to pass the date to an
OpenCOBOL subprogram and have it do the test and return the value to the
Fujitsu main.

I can think of some other things that this approach might support.

*OBVIOUSLY* the two COBOL wouldn't "share" COBOL-type resourced (e.g.
EXTERNAL data or files) but for some combinations it would seem a possible
solution to "real-world" problems.