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

["William M. Klein" <wmklein@ix.netcom.com>]

I am still a little confused.  You do know that both ":" and ">" are already
part of the COBOL language?  (There is NOTHING that can/will change that.)

As far as "comments" in source code goes,  personally, I know of no two
languages that use the same "indicators" for this.  Again, obviously, an "*"
in column 7 *must* stay a comment indicator as long as fixed-form reference
format is kept in COBOL (which because of the "obsolete" rules, will be at
least two more revisions of COBOL).

As far as current with "evolving technology",

A) XML wasn't even a consideration when this revision work began (you could
raise the issue NOW, but that would probably delay the revision until the
"next" evolving" technology comes along)

B) You would have a REAL hard time convincing J4/WG4 that XML compatibility
was more important than compatibility with any of a NUMBER of other
"languages" - each of which uses a different comment indicator (as far as I
know).

Bill Klein
  wmklein <at> ix.netcom.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-gnu-cobol@wallace.lusars.net
> [mailto:owner-gnu-cobol@wallace.lusars.net]On Behalf Of
> RKRayhawk@aol.com
> Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2000 9:33 PM
> To: gnu-cobol@lusars.net
> Subject: Re: gnubol: Re: Determining free-form or fixed-form
> referenceformat.
>
>
>
> 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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