Re: [GNU-COBOL] Quiet on the list?

["Boris Kortiak" <BKortiak@genlyte.com>]

Justin,

I guess my concerns about a dedicated COBOL editor have more to do with then having it available for a debugger in an integrated fashion.  In other words same look and feel to viewing the source when animating as when editing.  I suppose this would be possible with the editors listed.

Some other things I realized that good COBOL editors can do (after writing message) are to provide formatting help.  This would be things like auto-numbering in columns 1-6; setting tab stops; filling in id columns 73-80; showing contents of copy files.  One of my favorite editors (CMS CANDE on the Burroughs small computers) would automagically create patch decks from your entries.

Patch decks, that's something I've not seen talked about...  A patch deck is something like a diff list that the compiler (and editor) can use to keep track of changes.  That's not a good explanation, here's an example.

Say we have a program foo that is frozen at the current version.  Client A requests a change to the software.  I use the editor to make the necessary changes.  The editor then keeps only the changes in a patch deck, bar.  When I compile the program I notify the compiler to use the frozen foo source and apply the changes in the bar patch deck.  Now I can keep foo in the sources directory and keep bar in the client A patches directory.

I don't remember if its ANSI, but it is really a great feature.  I suppose it's an ancient form of version control and some newer tools are available, but I don't have anything else at work.

I hope that made sense.

B

>>> "Justin C. Ferguson" <jferg@acm.org> 06/18/99 10:56AM >>>
When last we left our heros, they were speaking of:
<snip> 
> My experience with *nix editors is limited to vi, so I'm not sure what the listed ones are capable of.  My list of needs would be to have the syntax highlighting that you mentioned, maybe something like VB.  Reserved words one color, verbs another, literals a third, variables a forth.  I would think this would require a little intelligence on the part of the editor to keep tabs on these elements.
> 
> Your thoughts?

 elvis and vim (both vi clones) offer syntax highlighting, and of 
course, emacs does everything, so I'm sure it has some kind of syntax highlight
support if you feel like writing enough lisp.  Pico doesn't support any of that,
and I don't know about jed or joe, but if people can't figure out vi or emacs,
well, sounds like their problem.  ;->  



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