Clark Morris wrote: <begin extract> . . . there should be an IBM supplied service that maps all PLS and/or Assembler DSCECT to the appropriate mappings in other languages including COBOL, PL1, C/C++, Rexx and others . . . </end extract>
and we should all, I suspect, agree that something of this sort would be highly desirable. Unfortunately, the obstacles to constructing such a facility are not, or not chiefly, bureaucratic or financial. Not all of the data types supported by one or more of these target languages are supported by all of the others. Notoriously---It is under current discussion here---COBOL does not support explicit bit/boolean variables; nor does it support extended-precision HFP floating-point values or BFP asnd DFP floating-point values of any precision. REXX does not support proper pointers. C knows nothing of current-length-halfword prefixed varying strings. Etc., etc., ad nauseam. Something can probably be done. PL/I, for example, permits a data-type slot in a structure declaration to be replaced by an asterisk placeholder, and in COBOL 'FILLER' could be [mis]used for this purpose. The design problem is that of doing what is possible in a target language without fatally compromising the usefulness of the templates one produces, and it is a daunting one. Moreover, statement-level procedural languages are not interchangeable. Some are much more powerful, in the sense of being closer to assembly language in the facilities they make available, than others. Templates constructed in some target SLPLs are thus likely to be very much more useful than those constructed in others. None of these comments is intended to discourage worthy efforts of this sort, but the difficulties do need to be appreciated. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
