Mark Bixby wrote:

> I could write a standard MPE Pascal or COBOL program
> and have Perl run that to perform the database I/O, but it would be much more
> elegant if I could just call the TurboIMAGE intrinsics directly from Perl in
> the form of an XS extension module (XS can define an interface between Perl and
> any native OS function call).

Bear in mind, my answer is going to be "abstract" since I'm neither a
perl nor Posix expert, but there are some caveats here...

I'm not familiar with XS, but have seen other perl extensions.  In the
most extreme case, you define headers (foo.ph) that prototype some system
function which is in turn linked with the perl executable.

Perl modules (foo.pm) can use the "Dynaloader" to link to runtime
shared libraries, but the mechanics are different between Unix and
MPE/iX (the MPE equivalent being loading a routine from an XL).

This did not work until a recent build by Mark Klein where he indeed
got the dynaloader to work; I presume he supplied this on the IPROF
freeware tape.

With that said, then yes, it's time to encapsulate the Image calls :-)
Ted Ashton <[log in to unmask]> was toying with this recently, you
might get in touch with him.  And if I can FTP the GNU stuff from
somewhere I might find some spare time too :-)  If we can get a
"prototype" skeleton out of the Image port, it wouldn't be too much of
a stretch to chase after some other intrinsics as well.

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>