Re: [GNU-COBOL] New to list

["David L. Nicol" <david@kasey.umkc.edu>]

Chad Slaughter wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> David L. Nicol wrote :>
> >
> >Is there a checklist of COBOL features?  COBOL doesn't have that many
> 
> Yes, the ANSI Cobol standard plus addendums.

And is that on, like, our web site (like Tom Christensen's unix
duplication
project?)

> data types isn't the correct term: COBOL has variable storage and
> it has files.

Yeah, I'm shamelessly whittling on a square pegs

> the pic clasue restricts what a valid value is in a storage unit,

So storage units have associated with them a restriction clause, which
is
consulted at every assignment event to throw an exception of some kind.

 
> But if you ignore all the standard details...its basically a number(fixed point
> decimal) and strings(fixed length).
> and files. =) ( sequential,relative, and indexed )
> 
> >Perl
> >translator would be a straightforward ten hours of iterating over pages
> >of the spec and implementing them one by one.
> 
> straightforward...maybe... ten hours... *shrugs* it could happen.
> We took a tad longer, but i dont want to discourage you.
> 
> Also, if you'd like to borrow my copy of the Cobol std, I can arrange to
> let you look at it.

I copied off Linda Hall Library's copy -- I don't have context for
it though, and I don't have any example programs to work on.  With an
example program to translate I could do a subset of the keywords and
build a framework for implementation of the rest of them.  I was shocked
that ANSI wanted $98 to let me download it in postscript format.  What
is the copyright status of an ANSI standard?  I mean, if I transcribe
each
page into an e-mail and send it to egroups list, have I done something
actionable?  Does someone have the ANSI $98 downloadable file to
liberate?

_______________________________________________________
               David Nicol 816.235.1187 nicold@umkc.edu

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