Re: gnubol: refmod again

[RKRayhawk@aol.com]

Just so it won't feel so bad later, I'll flag these valuable exchanges with 
the note that we will be better off just using precedence (in the grammar 
rule sense), and not hoping to do much in COBOL with associativity.  Maybe 
you can get somewhere with COMPUTE, but I fear that idiosyncracies in 
subscript (like unary positive) could cause you grief.  

But even at that precedence can usually be represented in rule structures. 
And that, rather than associativity specification, leaves you more flexible 
for special case handling and for error productions. This is at odds with the 
evolving ethic of being PCCTesque, if I might koine a phrase. In the end you 
will have to undo the concise rules, and lay it all out brutishly.

If you don't then you have either fooled yourself into thinking you got 
things done quickly, when you have left the whole project to semantics, or 
you will have difficulty righting the parser(s) in such a way that they do 
not generate lots of confusing error messages down stream from one or two 
minor errors.

Particularly, IMHO, it will not be a good plan to try to conquer 
qualification with operator precedence defined by means of associativity. At 
the level of references we should use brute force elaboration of rules to 
isolate as many problems as possible, and keep the verb constructs moving 
forward.

Best Wishes
Bob Rayhawk
RKRayhawk@aol.com

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