[GNU-COBOL] COB2C on Linux Weekly News

[Tim Josling <tej@melbpc.org.au>]

FYI: This letter was a response to a story that was posted on
Linux Weekly news (lwn.net)
Tim Josling

Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 20:56:07 +0200
 From: Toon Moene <toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl>
 To: letters@lwn.net
 Subject: GNU Cobol

 I read with some amusement the following blurb in LWN of the
24th of
 June:

 > GNU COBOL is now under development, as a result of Rildo
 > Pragana's decision to release the source code for a COBOL
compiler
 > he created for MSDOS years ago. Alan Cox has apparently thrown
in
 > some patches, as has Rildo, and now it actually produces GNU
 > assembler (gas). Of course, the goal is actually to get it to
produce 
 > C code. That would definitely help a lot of old COBOL projects
move in
 > the right direction ... [Thanks to David S de Lis]

 A casual reader might interpret the last sentence as meaning
that the
 only way to save old Cobol projects is to translate the Cobol
code into
 C.

 I think this a somewhat naive view on the reasons why code is
 maintainable or not.

 Cobol has its strengths in dealing with the processing of
business
 oriented data:  It supports a declarative syntax to enable
complex
 conversions between machine and human readable data.

 Converting Cobol to C would do nothing to improve the control
flow of
 the programs, while making its data handling completely
unreadable.

 Unless the only human resource one has available is C
programmers, I
 would strongly discourage such a conversion.

 What the world needs is a free Cobol compiler - if this is the
way to
 get one, even if it is not within the framework of the GNU
Compiler
 Collection (which would make it retargetable to other
architectures than
 the Intel ia32 model, among other benefits), then so be it.

 -- 
 Toon Moene (toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl)
 Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
 Phone: +31 346 214290; Fax: +31 346 214286
 GNU Fortran: http://world.std.com/~burley/g77.html

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