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

["Justin C. Ferguson" <jferg@acm.org>]

When last we left our heros, they were speaking of:
> 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.

	This would be a nice feature, and I think it could probably be done,
at least simplisticly, with some of elvis' built-in features, and almost 
surely with emacs.  I don't know about the rest.  I would be all for hacking
together something for this purpose for elvis, and emacs if anybody likes lisp
that much, but I think trying to write our own editor is something that 
should probably be put on the back burner for a while beyond the emacs/elvis
hacks.  It seems like a good "eventually" sort of thing to add to the todo
list.  
	Also, this brings up the distinction between an interpreter and a 
compiler, the idea of "animating" is going to be somewhat lost, at least 
in an interactive sense, with compiled COBOL.  

> 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.

	[...snip...]

	That would be a nice feature, and again, I think it would be a great
"eventually" feature, but for now it seems to me like we should basically 
focus on the compiler itself...  I think the patch deck concept could probably
be dealt with in the interim via a set of shell-script wrappers to elvis, that
would make and apply diffs to the source code when you ran them.  Just a 
thought, though.

								JF	

-- 
Justin Ferguson - Tech. Analyst, Sprint Paranet   jcfergus@sprintparanet.com
http://www.worldinter.net/~jferg/                       jferg@worldinter.net
A hollow voice says "Plugh".                                   jferg@acm.org 

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