Chuck Haatvedt <chuck.haatvedt@gmail.com> writes:
> I would like to propose that the ECPG precompiler for C, to be
> modified to accept either C or COBOL. Another option would be to
> clone ECPG to work with the COBOL language.
The latter option seems much more likely to succeed than the former.
Either way, however, I'd guess that the amount of COBOL expertise
in the existing Postgres community is not distinguishable from zero.
So "proposing" this is not going to make it happen. If you want to
step up with a patch, then maybe, but even then I'm not sure we'd
want to commit to maintaining it as part of the core PG project.
The most likely path to success is to plan on creating an ECPG
fork maintained separately by interested people.
FWIW, the only reason ECPG is part of our core distro is that
years ago it used to require significant manual effort to keep it
up to date with core grammar changes. Since we invented a process
for auto-generating the ECPG grammar from the core grammar, it's
seemed like maybe ECPG could be kept at arm's length after all,
though we've not seriously tried to push it out as a separate
project. We could talk about what additional stuff might be
needed in that infrastructure to make it work for a COBOL wrapper
... but I think somebody else has to take point on making that
happen.
regards, tom lane