Re: Would an *AdaScript* language be a good / bad idea?

["David Thompson" <david.thompson1@worldnet.att.net>]

Robert Dewar <dewar@gnat.com> wrote :
> Darren New <dnew@san.rr.com> wrote in message
news:<3CE3D8B4.C272C737@san.rr.com>...
>
> > Another feature of scripting languages is the almost casual use of
> > dynamically loaded code. It's not uncommon at all to calculate at run
> > time what executable code will be loaded, for example. ...

> Again, this is just a particular feature of languages, that some languages
> have and others don't. COBOL for example has dynamic binding of all procedure
> calls, and dynamic loading of code, and always has, and it is routine in the
> COBOL world to add new modules dynamically to a running program without
> stopping it. But most people would hardly consider COBOL to be a scripting
> language.
>
COBOL-the-language has provision for overlay linking/loading
(segments), and call to name-chosen-at-runtime program-unit
(= procedure, COBOL doesn't have user-written value-returning
functions, at least not yet), although I don't recall (and no longer
have the books available to check) if these are in the base
conformance level or optional.

But to my knowledge only CICS, and Tandem's roughly similar
but much less known PATHWAY, support(ed) adding new modules
transparently to a running program in the fashion of Java or
AIUI Erlang or explicit DLL/so's, much less direct source execution
like shells and awk/perl/etc.  (Admittedly CICS may be or have been
the environment for more COBOL code than any single alternative.)

Some OSes (also) support extralingual dynamic loading and/or calling,
which can apply to any supported language, at least any compiled
in the normal way, but perhaps somewhat more easily to COBOL
because it has just about the simplest possible calling convention.

--
- David.Thompson 1 now at worldnet.att.net