Re: [open-cobol-list] Status of Cobol

[Mike Simons]

On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 09:00:57AM +0100, Gary Cowell wrote:
>  --- Jim Morcombe <address@hidden> wrote: 
> > I assume from the lack of response to my last
> > posting that Open Cobol is
> > still a long way away from being a usable compiler.
[...]
> I suggest grabbing
> the latest sources from CVS, compiling it up and
> compiling some of your source with it. Also in CVS is
> the todo list which might give you a clue as to the
> status of your favourite features.

  Definitely don't use the tar files that are available on the home web
page... they are a year old.  Latest CVS snapshot is much more usable.

  Unfortunately there don't appear to be CVS tags between "release_0_23"
and now that you can pull.


  I'd say the compiler is useful, given a batch of about 4500 cobol
files (3.4 million lines), only about 100 failed to compile for about
5 reasons (things not implemented like COMP-2, FUNCTION, PIC 9(31), and
some MF specific syntax, etc).

  Some runtime failures like INITIALIZE wipes FILLERS (but should not),
LOW_VALUE in UNSTRING operation results in a endless loop, and one
mysterious runtime failure in a very complex move of some complex
record over another corrupting memory... the last one hasn't been 
isolated yet, the others are worked around.  (I've hoping to 
post test cases of these failures...)