Re: [Tiny-cobol-users] PROGRAM ID

[David E. <de...@ar...>]

Roger While wrote:
  > David Essex wrote :

  > ...
  >> BTW, doesn't the above methodology lead to illegal program
  >> name lengths under certain conditions ?
  >
  > Haven't come across one yet :-)
  > Remember COBOL words are restricted to 31 characters
  > (also in 2002/2008 standards) so should not be a problem.
  > Even if all 31 characters were mangled, 93 characters for
  > gcc is no problem :-)

Some mainframe COBOL compilers, as an extension, support names as long
as 160 characters.


  >> Anyway, I think the main issue here is program naming conventions
  >> are platform (OS ?) dependent.
  >> ...
  >> Especially when a COBOL 'module' is called from from another
  >> language. So basically you lose some OS functionality and add
  >> some more complexity.
  >
  > Well that's always going to be the case. If you want to call
  > COBOL from non-COBOL, then you are always going to have to look
  > at the particular COBOL implementation as to how to do this.

IMHO, that should not be the case.

On many platforms you can mix C, C++ and/or Pascal (and many other
languages) without too much difficulty, regardless of the compiler. And
certainly does not require a special link-loader just to resolve the name.

Perhaps a special C macro, much like when a C programs calls C++
functions (#ifdef _cplusplus ...).
This could perform some form of 'name (un)mangling', if required.
This should work, I think.


  > ...
  > The 2002 standard has :
  > PROGRAM-ID. program-name [AS literal] ......

What is the point of having two program-names ?

Anyway, water under the bridge, unless some else would like
to create a new TC release.