[open-cobol-list] tree data, embedding a language or string interpolation?

[Patrick]

With Jim's help I am working on a web application written in Cobol. It 
will likely take me some time and I will do it in stages. The first 
stage is going to be an offline webpage generator and in doing so, the 
first obstacle is the templating engine. I will just upload static after 
it's done.

Cobol is good for lots of things but in seems to me that at it's core it 
is Awk on steroids. It is really good for tabular data but what about 
tree data.  I can chop up a tree based webpage into "square snippets" 
but it would be nice to have other options. The best option is a way to 
parse HTML from Cobol but baring that string interpolation would solve 
the problem too.

So for instance with "<title> $title </title>" the variable $title is 
inserted into the string, no need for concatenation.

If Cobol does not support this, I was thinking of embedding another 
language that supports it.

Python and Lua do not support this.
PHP and Perl do but I'd rather not
Ruby, Tcl, Falcon and Vala support this.

Ruby can interact with C but it's normally to extend Ruby. mruby is 
being designed to be embedded and will compete with Lua but it's not 
ready yet.

I like Tcl and I like jimsh but Tcl is slightly quirky.
I don't know much about Flacon but Brian does and he already has samples 
of how to use it with Cobol
Ditto for Vala

Any feedback would be appreciated-Patrick