Re: [open-cobol-list] OpenCOBOL release 1.0

[Ben Duncan]

Ok, I have been silent on this LISt for a lONG time.

Can I add my 2 cents here?

Tim, why not look at s-lang as a basis for the the NEW COBOL.
It has a COMPLETE screen handling function that IMHO, is superior
to ncurses in some respect.  Since it has a interpretor already,
It could be a GOOD place to start for a COBOL environment.

In some ways, it already resembles a COBOL environment.

Tim Josling wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-12-29 at 20:20 +0100, Alain wrote:
>
<SNIP>
> As for COBOL for GCC, I left my job recently and have been working
> full-time on COBOL for GCC since 3 December 2007. I plan to work on it
> for six months full-time.
>
> I have started from scratch again, and this time I am writing it mostly
> in Lisp. The GCC back end interface will be in C and so will the
> run-time routines that cannot be written in COBOL.
>
> My reasons for writing in Lisp are
>
> 1. I found that coding in C was too slow and tedious and I believe,
> based on experiments I have undertaken, that Lisp will be more
> productive by a large factor. Thus I should be able to get the compiler
> finished a lot more quickly.
>
> So far I am up to 6,000 lines of code and I am seeing about a 3-fold
> reduction in LOC for Lisp versus C. Far fewer ugly bugs also. The
> performance is good enough it appears.
>
> 2. As a proof of concept of the above theory about Lisp. I have some
> other things I want to do in a very competitive environment and I want
> to use the most powerful tools available.
>
> While it seems Python and Ruby are also highly productive, they lack
> some of the features of Lisp that I need (macros for example), and
> performance cannot be tuned to close to C performance, which you can do
> with Lisp.
>
> Regards,
> Tim Josling
<SNIP>

--
Ben Duncan - Business Network Solutions, Inc. 336 Elton Road  Jackson MS, 39212
"Never attribute to malice, that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"
       - Hanlon's Razor