[open-cobol-list] open-cobol-0.9.6

[Keisuke Nishida]

Hi,

I have released OpenCOBOL 0.9.6, an open-source COBOL compiler
forked from TinyCOBOL.

  http://www.open-cobol.org/

As some of you might know, I originally started my project
because I was more comfortable with modifying the compiler
as I feel like.

After a long period of time, I have completely reimplemented
the compiler, the preprocessor, and the run-time library, and
OpenCOBOL has now become a totally different COBOL compiler
than TinyCOBOL.

A major difference between OpenCOBOL and TinyCOBOL is that
OpenCOBOL translates COBOL into C and uses GCC to build an
executable.  This means that OpenCOBOL can be ported wherever
GCC works (in theory).  Some people are using it on MacOS X,
for example.

At the moment, OpenCOBOL lacks many facilities that TinyCOBOL
has, including SORT/MERGE statements, intrinsic functions,
SCREEN SECTION, embedded SQL, and GDB supports.  On the other
hand, OpenCOBOL scores better points in the NIST's COBOL core
testsuite (NC module).

For now, I am trying to make OpenCOBOL more stable and easy
to use rather than adding lots of facilities.  After it has
become sufficiently stable for production use in my work, I am
going to implement further functionalities, like embedded SQL
with ODBC support.

I think I am going to concentrate on OpenCOBOL rather than
contributing to TinyCOBOL any more.  Still I think it would
be great if we could share some ideas and resources (like
test suite), as we both have the same goal: implementing an
open-source COBOL compiler.

I guess there are some people who are interested in OpenCOBOL,
so I have announced it here.  Any comments are welcome.

Thank you for reading.

Best regards,
Keisuke Nishida