Re: [Tiny-cobol-users] PostISAM

[Merlin M. <mmo...@gm...>]

On 8/19/05, Jim Morcombe <ro...@vi...> wrote:
> Merlin
>=20
> If this product was available, then I would certainly be interested,
>=20
> As for the work involved in doing it - developers seem to be very short
> on the ground at the moment.

Well of course I would have to undertake any such effort myself :).

I looked at the tinycobol sources for a bit to see how things are
built and got a feel for the major challenges.  I think the first and
most important challenge is to abstract the file interface so that it
can be selectable, preferrably on a per-file basis.  I think the
easiest way to do this is to move all file i/o calls behind a table of
function pointers that can be linked in and swapped out at runtime.

This leads to next major challenge which is to consider reorganizing
the file interface a bit.  For example, it might be worthwhile to
consider separating the sequential, relative and indexed interfaces.=20
(maybe not).  Also, the field information for all the fields that
contain data need to be emitted from the cobol compiler at compile
time (to be loaded when the file is opened) or passed through all the
interface functions.

Sorry if I'm presuming to much, I just dont all my hard work to go to
waste.  Our ISAM bridge here actually works better than the vendor
supplied file system in most respects.

Merlin