Fellow COBOL Fans,
Thanks to a recent post on the list I just noticed OpenCOBOL 2.0 is
available for download. It took me a while to find it. 1.1 is still the
lastest listed on the OpenCOBOL web site.
What's new in 2.0? The last entry in the ChangeLog file in the source
tarball is from June of 2010.
Can 2.0 handle wide characters? I see it links against ncursesw now instead
of ncurses, and I see a few spots in libcob/screenio.c where setlocale would
be called, but those spots are wrapped with #if 0 ... #endif. My C skills
are at the novice level at best. Does the #if 0 ... #endif essentially
comment out the code in between? I tried compiling a program with 2.0 and
couldn't enter wide characters. I then tried patching libcob/screenio.c to
include a call to setlocale that would get executed, as I've done with
OpenCOBOL 1.1 in the past, but still couldn't enter wide characters.
Is there a way to position the cursor when using the SCREEN SECTION in 2.0?
That's one feature I've often wished was available in 1.1.
Is there a way to customise the promptchar without patching
libcob/screenio.c? I run programs via rxvt-unicode locally and/or remotely
via PuTTY. Both are capable of displaying underlined text. I underline
fields with the UNDERLINE keyword in the SCREEN SECTION. I don't like
having fields filled with underscores.
I noticed one build problem when I was creating an ArchLinux package for
OpenCOBOL 2.0. There's a part in the libcob Makefile that removes several
files from $(includedir)/libcob/. It ignores $(DESTDIR). By patching the
Makefile.{am,in} files and adding $(DESTDIR) to all the
rm $(includedir)/libcob/... commands I was able to build an ArchLinux
package.