I work on Unisys ClearPath MCP — DMSII, DASDL, WFL, COBOL-74 and COBOL-85, ALGOL and DMALGOL — and on the compilers for them.
Most of what is here answers one of the two questions a team running an MCP machine eventually has to answer: is this database about to stop, and how do we get the data out of it.
DASDL reads the language a DMSII database uses to describe itself, builds a model of the database, and writes out a relational schema. Its grammar is drawn as railroad diagrams rather than written, and a generator turns the drawing into the parser.
Run it without installing anything — the compiler itself, compiled to WebAssembly, in one self-contained page. Paste a description or open one off your own disk, and watch the schema come out. The page fetches nothing, so your description never leaves the tab.
dmsii-to-sql is what that compiler does at production scale: 19,011 lines of a real DASDL description into 780 tables, 69 indexes and 1,034 triggers, in 0.29 seconds. The input and the output sit side by side so the translation can be argued with.
A data set that fills the population declared for it in the DASDL does not slow down and does not warn you. It fails, and the database stays down until someone reorganises that structure. The number that predicts it has been sitting in the description file the whole time.
DBANALYZER prints it for every structure, on one page. SDSANALYZER writes the same inventory as XML, so you can keep a monthly history and read the slope instead of the number. BIGOPEN is for when it already stopped and the control file no longer recognises its own files.
None of the three opens the database. They read the description file, so they take no locks and need no window.
LINCOFF2MDB flattens the LINCOFF tree that Unisys EAE (formerly LINC) produces into rows · LIB_CARACTERES gives COBOL the character translation the language does not have · COMMANDS · BUFFERLIB · CLEAR_NOT_ASCII · COBOL-DATE-TO-WORDS
Available for work on ClearPath MCP systems: DMSII modernisation, migration to relational databases, COBOL and ALGOL, and the tooling around them. Chilean and Spanish nationality — I can work in the EU with no sponsorship, and remotely from Chile.