[open-cobol-list] COBOL for GCC

[Frank Swarbrick]

Tim Josling wrote:
> 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.


Hi Tim,

I am curious about your decision to code COBOL for GCC in Lisp.  How
does this affect what is needed to compile a Cobol program?  Will some
sort of "Lisp runtime" be required?  Or will just the regular C runtime
be required?  How about just running the compiled Cobol program?  I
assume there will be a Cobol runtime that will be required, but will a
Lisp runtime also be required?

I will be quite interested to see the compiler.  I've learned a lot
about compilers just by reading the source for OpenCobol, and comparing
to another Cobol compiler should be very interesting!

I've also been studying a lot of languages recently, and while Lisp is
not one of them, Scheme is.  Which Lisp compiler are you using for Cobol
for GCC?

Of course the more languages I learn the more I come to hate Cobol,
but...  :-)

Does Cobol for GCC produce the GCC "intermediate language" as its
output, and then feed that in to gcc?

Finally, do you plan on supporting anything in Cobol 2002 and beyond,
like OpenCobol does?

Frank