Release of GnuCOBOL 3.1.2

[Simon Sobisch]

Hello!

Three years (and multiple release candidates without a final version)
after GnuCOBOL 2.2 the GnuCOBOL developers are proud to announce the
formal release of GnuCOBOL 3.1.2.


Noteworthy changes
==================

The amount of features are too much to note, but you can skip over the
attached NEWS file to investigate them, here are some of the highlights:

Huge improvements for compatibility to different COBOL dialects, better
error handling and adjustable exceptions per COBOL 2002; more modern
format for diagnostic messages (especially useful when used in an
integrated development environment possible in Emacs, Vim, VSCodium and
others) and improved source-level debugging.

Shipped with 3.0-rc1 already:
  XML GENERATE and JSON GENERATE
  REPORT WRITER module
  sparse and split key support

GnuCOBOL 3.x keeps full compatibility to GnuCOBOL 2.2, you can therefore
use old COBOL modules without recompile, if needed, but these modules
will miss some of the newer features in this case.


Getting the Software
====================

As always source kits for official releases can be downloaded from
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnucobol/
but we suggest to use a mirror a nearby mirror for higher
download bandwidth:
  https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnucobol

The SourceForge mirrors were also updated
  https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucobol/files/gnucobol/3.1/

NEWS
Description: Text document