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

[Brian Tiffin]

On Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:41:11 -0400, Patrick  
<address@hidden> wrote:

> 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.

Yeah, Jim is da man.  You have to keep your eyes on the quietly productive  
people.  They DO things.  ;-)

> 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.

I've never tried it with .html, but libXML2 may be just the thing for this.

Sergey wrote a sample that recursively travels through nodes.

http://www.opencobol.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=1499&forum=1#forumpost7795

I can't see why libXML2 wouldn't handle HTML files.  I could be wrong  
though.

> 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.

And REBOL3 is open source now.  I'll be embedding R3 in OpenCOBOL someday  
soon.  REBOL makes tree traversal almost easy.  REBOL 2.7.8 is a worthy  
toolkit for any developer.  Source is not open, but the system is free to  
redistribute (unmodified) and now includes the SDK features that used to  
be for fee.  REBOL 2 and RebGUI for the win.  The recent release of REBOL  
3 has reinvigorated the developments, but it lacks some of the niceties  
built into REBOL 2.  R3 will be a sweet thing soon though.  Many busy  
beavers.

http://www.rebol.com   Carl Sassenrath is one of my heroes.

Another nifty little language is the Unicon fork of Icon.  (I was being  
jokey when I said nifty little.  Icon is one of the most advanced  
programming languages on the planet.)  The late Ralph Griswold's name also  
hangs on the heroes wall.  http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/ and  
https://sourceforge.net/projects/unicon/  The books are well written and  
free.  I hope the experimental $C macro handler gets into V13 of Unicon,  
but I've already proven the old LOADFUNC Icon feature works with OpenCOBOL  
modules.  Full integration with Unicon will be voodoo ridden, which is  
perfect.  ;-)

> 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

Use all these.  ;-)

V8 and Spidermonkey javascript are on the table too, already proven as  
embeddable systems.  I haven't looked this week, but as soon as Node.js  
ships as a shared library (it's in the docs, but the make breaks), we'll  
have Node.js in OpenCOBOL as well.

In terms of 'synergy';  OpenCOBOL is destined to become a GNU project.   
Keisuke Nishida started OC, and also plays a key role in Guile  
development.  Guile is the GNU scripting engine of choice.  So, it'll make  
sense for the 'official' branch of OpenCOBOL to support a --with-guile  
option to the ./configure compiler builds.  That is in the works, but I  
was waiting for the Guile 2 release to become more ubiquitous before  
diving in head first.

Guile (along with it's roots in Lisp) is a multi-language interpreter  
now.  It'll even decode

+++++ +++++ [ > +++++ ++ > +++++ +++ > + <<< - ] > -- .  + .  > ++ .  --  
.  > .

to display DERP.  I'll just say that code is bf, as I'm not a huge fan of  
the actual name given to the brain twisting language, even though it's a  
lot of fun for how useless it is.

Keisuke assisted with the Guile VM layer. So in terms of GNU adoption,  
Guile support will put a plus in the accept column.

Cheers,
Brian

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