Re: Informix 4GL Help !!


On 26 Oct 2005 16:24:10 -0700, cboccio@xxxxxxxxxxxx <cboccio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> I have the following situation in my customer:
> - They have informix 5.10 and 4GL 4.20 and now they want to buy a new
> version of informix database (9.40 or 10) and 4GL (7.3x). But the
> problem is:
> Some 4GL programs doesn=B4t have the "program font" and I don=B4t know
> how can I do to compile this in the new version of 4GL. There are some
> tool that do this job, for exemple, read the executable and make a
> "program font", or some thing like that ??
> What kind of solution can I give to this customer ? (Is there a
> solution ??)



What do you mean by 'program font'? I can think of two main possibilities:

* The program source code.
* The fonts displayed on a terminal.

In the latter case, the fonts are not compiled into I4GL; to the extent that
fonts are selectable at all, they are configured via the termcap (or
terminfo) entries used by I4GL, and by the terminal emulator package (xterm,
....) that you use.

In the former case, your customer is pretty much stuck. You need the source
code. If you are working with the c-code version of I4GL, you really don't
have any options. If you are working with p-code, you could, in theory,
reverse engineer much of the source code, but it is hard work on
undocumented material. You could look up rdslib and (in this case, more
usefully) rdsscan on the IIUG Software archive. It can handle large-scale
parsing of I4GL code - picking out functions, reports, global variables, etc
- and IIRC the documentation has a little info on the internals of
functions. However, you'd have quite a lot of work to do to get up to a
working decompiler.

If you mean something else, please explain more clearly.

--
Jonathan Leffler #include <disclaimer.h>
Email: jleffler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, jleffler@xxxxxxxxxx
Guardian of DBD::Informix v2005.02 -- http://dbi.perl.org/
sending to informix-list
.

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