Re: [GNU-COBOL] Lines of code

["Chad Slaughter" <slaught@umr.edu>]

Tim Josling wrote :>

>After I sent the email I realised I would probably get a response
>like this. 

Well, as long as I didnt disappoint you. =)

>My intent was to illustrate the size of the task, and to point

well, I am quite sure everyone, is well aware of the size of the 
task at hand. its one of the reasons we are taking the time to
choose appropriate tools. We dont want to get 3/4 of the way there
and realize, it cant be finished. 

>out that there is a lot of work that can be done in parallel and
>in my view should be done in parallel. The main thing is to get a

Yes, there is alot of work that can be done in parallel.
And its just a matter of me nad laura partiationing it out more.
But there is one task, that everyone, right now, needs to do.
And that is become familar with teh Cobol standard and write
functional test code with input and outputs. I can stress this
enough. Everything else is cake, compared to that task.

>good framework in place that can allow many people to contribute

I am working on doing this for the runtime system. But understand all
the tasks can not be done in parallel. There are many dependencies
in the process, good framework or not.

>I guess on the parser side I will have to 'learn by my own
>mistakes' as King Lear said all fools must do... Bison is fine
>for the preprocessor, with a bit of extra code wrapped around it.

And if you wish to use bison for the preprocessing task, then by
all means go ahead. I do believe I said that eariler.
But done try and extrapolate your experience with bison on a small
portion to the rest of the system. It doens work.

>Have you come to a conclusion about what capabilities the parser
>needs to parse COBOL? From my example of identifier, any LR(k)
>parser will not do, it would seem you need a back-tracking parser

??? LR(k) will handle the Cobol grammar. There are no conclusions of
yet about the parser. They will be forth coming when laura finishes
here research. 

>(ie slow). I have no knowledge of what's out there beyond LALR(1)
>parsers. I have found a couple of bugs in bison, so I would be
>very cautious of picking something even more off the beaten
>track, 

Well you arent alone. In my experience, most people dont know what's 
out there and assume what they have is the best.  
which I guess why most ppl use win95.


Chad
-- 
Chad Slaughter  -- slaught at umr.edu
<PGP public key available upon request>

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