RE: gnubol: refmod again (fwd)

[Randall Bart <Barticus@att.net>]

At 20:37 12/1/99 , William M. Klein wrote:

>3) Can someone help me understand the comment,
>   "If they're proposing general expressions in subscripts with no better
>provision for them than you report, maybe it should be for large values of
>X."
>   What do you think is missing? There are rules for "subscript out of bounds"
>(which are more explicit than those in the '85 Standard).

We're only discussing parsing issues at this point.  He was saying that if 
arithmetic expressions are allowed as subscripts in the next standard it 
will be COBOL-20XX for large values of X.

>4) From the title of this "thread" (and not seeing what went before), did
>this begin with a discussion of what to do if an arithmetic expression as the
>start position or length of reference-modification doesn't evaluate to be an
>integer?

We're only discussing parsing issues at this point.  The problem is things like

      FUNCTION MIN (A (B:C) D)
      FUNCTION MIN (A (B) D)

We don't know whether B is part of reference modification or the second 
parameter, until we reach ")" or ":".  At that point we need to backtrack, 
which is a parsing pain because B could be an expression.

>Does this answer any of the "real" outstanding questions, or should I have
>stayed quiet until I "caught" up on what the real questions/issue are/were?

Don't worry whether it's relevant, it's always good to find out little 
tidbits about the standard.

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