Broomberg:

     ...write a generic layout parser which includes data conversion.

There is a awful lot of data out there in files stored with COBOL-FD/WS layouts waiting to be extracted and reported, an awful lot of pathological rubbish waiting to be eclectically listed.

In other words: this sounds like a Perl problem of the first hour. There are little languages that deal with such data efficiently but they are quite expensive (Easytrieve plus for instance). Somehow the efforts put into perl dealing with them are either non-existant, non-succesfull or not widely accepted (and thus on CPAN) upto now. These days even Linux is swimming into the pool of z-Series mainframes, so now might be a good time to get this going.

I for one would be very interested.

What modules would be necessary in a good COBOL-data toolkit?

In reply to Re: COBOL Layout parsing by mAsterdam
in thread COBOL Layout parsing by broomberg

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