Re: gnubol: GNU Ada

["Fred Neale" <fneale@tss.com.au>]

Agreed, this is something well worth considering for the future, but I feel that
there are more pressing issues to be considered for now (such as ACCEPT
variable-name FROM DATE).

Most COBOL implementations that I know of using DBCS (including the ones which I
am actively involved in) use a GUI front end, running under an ethnic version of
Windows for the client. The server software does not need to know the contents
of the data with which it is being fed, only that the receiving data fields are
big enough. Therefore, to enter an 8-byte alphanumeric field in DBCS, it is
sufficient to define the field as pic x(16).

For numeric fields, the solution is simpler - the Chinese, Japanese etc. all use
Arabic numerals in business anyway - in fact, I don't think that there is a DBCS
implementation for numerals in any COBOL compiler.

I doubt that XML will add any complications as, again, the same principles will
apply.

Regards

Fred Neale







RKRayhawk@aol.com on 30/12/99 05:48:23 PM

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 To:      gnu-cobol@lusars.net                                
                                                              
 cc:      (bcc: Fred Neale/TSS)                               
                                                              
                                                              
                                                              
 Subject: Re: gnubol: GNU Ada                                 
                                                              









IN posting valuable comments about GNU Ada,
in a message dated 12/29/99 3:36:15 PM EST, tej@melbpc.org.au writes:

<< It also has full wide character support,
 even for compiler source - so identifiers can even be in chinese
 characters!
 >>


We may want to give some consideration to wide character data at some point
soon. XML will be a vehicle to move displays of major repositories on the
net, and it's international orientation has lead way into UTF (-8 and -16).
We also have some codebase issues with big blue's EGCS and DBCS.

There was some discussion a while back about adding an attribute to a POINTER
(as an extension) that could make it iterate by 16 bit units when
incremented/decremented rather than 8 bit units (I think we were calling that
a CLARK pointer, and ranting about how to isolate experimental code).

These aligators are all around us. Just waiting for us to expand the size of
this effort before
they devour us.

Getting the source code in fancy text format is another issue, I think.
Should we read your comments, Tim, to be a voluntary revision of the
preprocessor to UTF? :-)

Best Wishes,
Bob Rayhawk
RKRayhawk@aol.com




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