Re: gnubol: Re: Determining free-form or fixed-form referenceformat.

[RKRayhawk@aol.com]

Bill, 

Thanks for your response to my question about angle brackets, in the context 
of comments and directives in the proposed standards. The problem with angle 
brackets of any kind for any purpose is that they can make it difficult to 
evolve COBOL to include markup language as native source code.  XML, in my 
opinion, is a crucial busiess technology.

You comment correctly about literals. But my concern is getting the common 
business oriented language onto the net, and effectively.  If we have to 
quote markup language in COBOL, then we'll never get there.

Your useful comment about having a terminator, as in 

   Move ABC *> sending field <* to XYZ

leads to lexical surface that can never be made compatible with markup 
language.

If *> and >> are coming into the language, then it will never be the tool  
that is used t specify the internet.

It is interesting that XML allows a comment of the form

  <<-- this is a comment, and it takes 4+4 strokes to demark it -->>

That format has an initiator and terminator.    If *> can be considered for 
addition to the language, can we not consider an alternative, that is 
_current_ with evolving technologies.

In my opinion, this matter is not just a lexical nicety.  If the markers are 
added as it currently appears they will be, then all users of COBOL will 
always have to use a different development tool for XML. Forever!

For different reasons this happened with SQL, which is a real expensive fact. 
 SQL and XML should be built into COBOL. The angle-brackets (and the colon 
actually) are closing the door for COBOL.

Best Wishes,
Bob Rayhawk
RKRayhawk@aol.com

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