Re: gnubol: [leclay@ibm.net: Can I help?]

[Tim Josling <tej@melbpc.org.au>]

Ralph,

Your help is welcome. You can have a look at recent discussion -
follow the links to the mailing list archive from
<http://www.gnu.org/software/cobol/>. You will see we are looking
at two models for the grammar, one using bison (available from
<http://timjosling.homepage.com>) and another using pccts. 

The bison grammar which I wrote has not been fully debugged, and
only includes the cobol nucleus plus a few other odds and ends.
It started as a test of concept - can you do a cobol grammar with
bison? The answer appears to be "yes, provided you don't mind
coding quite a few hacks, which are all documented at the start
of the grammar.

Any comments on the grammar would be welcome, and if you want to
write some code for the project, we can help you pick a task. If
you can give us some more material on where your skills lie
(languages you know for example, would you be interested in doing
some bison work). 

(A minor point but in my understanding the bison hairy parser
supports the same grammars as bison simple, but as reentrant
code. If you are just relying on the parser you either need
hacks, lexer feedback, predicates or backtracking to parse cobol
IMO.)

We have a good amount of COBOL expertise, although more is always
useful as there are so many platforms etc. I think the critical
resource is people to write and test code. To that end I am
looking at building a subset of COBOL in phase I so that people
can write some of the runtime and maybe even the compiler (though
not the core parser) in COBOL. This is discussed in the mailing
list archives.

Tim Josling

> X-Accept-Language: en
> To: tweedy@lusars.net
> Subject: Can I help?
> 
> Dear Ms Tweedy,
> 
> Can I help?
> 
> I've been doing COBOL, on & off, for 34 years.  Starting with COBOL B on
> a 16k Honeywell H120 & 3 tape drives.  My COBOL class was on a Burroughs
> B280 improved, with 4k & 4 tape drives.  I started writing COBOL when
> you started your compile & hoped it'd be finished when you got back from
> lunch.
> 
> How's the BNF definition of the grammar coming along?  Are you using
> Bison Simple, 1 look ahead token, or Bison Hairy, 2 look ahead tokens?
> I've never attempted Hairy.
> 
> I've also used yacc for around 6 years.  The primary project was a
> compiler for the Advantis proprietary Call Management Language (CAMEL).
> I've used it for various other smaller tools development projects.
> 
> Regards,
> Ralph Jones
> 
> ----- End forwarded message -----

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