Re: gnubol: Anyone actually working on Cobol

[Michael McKernan <mck@tivoli.mv.com>]

>>>>> "Boris" == Boris  <bpkprsnl@erols.com>
>>>>> wrote the following on Tue, 16 Nov 1999 20:28:34 -0500

  Boris> Fred Neale wrote:

  >> David L. Nicol wrote (in part) on 13/11/99 <snip> > Although
  >> portability would be maintained better by preprepreprocessing >
  >> with > > sed s/PREFORM/PERFORM/g
  >> 
  >> Why not just spell it right in the first place?
  >> 
  >> Fred Neale

  Boris> Ok, that was a horrible example.  Let's say instead I wanted
  Boris> a new FUNCTION or VERB or something (like being able to do
  Boris> LOG in COBOL), I would like a simple extensible way to add
  Boris> the necessary code to do this.  Some of the people I have
  Boris> talked to have other ideas for functionality they would like
  Boris> to add, either as generally accepted COPY libraries or as
  Boris> extensions to COBOL.

That's easy, Boris.  We just have to change our mission slightly so
that, instead of COBOL '85, we produce COBOL '61 extended.  If we do
that, we'll have the DEFINE verb, which permits you to create new
verbs so long as they can be defined in terms of existing COBOL
language.  If we'd rather not do that, Tim has expressed his
intention of providing a macro facility in some advanced version of
his preprocessor.

I was a little taken aback by your original suggestion.  COBOL has
already reserved a significant fraction of English words in common
use.  Reserving all the variant spellings doesn't help matters.
Perhaps the committee should decree that all user defined words must
be in German.



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