Work on the project stopped for a number of years, for good but uninteresting reasons, but I have recently started work again. In fact I left my job recently to work on the project. I took a holiday first and I'm now working full time on the project. I plan for work on the project for at least six months and I think that will suffice to get a substantial part of the work done. My plan is to get a minimal subset running and then put it up on sourceforge, at which point I will be inviting others to help. Our first attempt produced 80,000 lines of code and I would estimate we were about 30% of the way there. I have started again with a different approach using LISP as the main language for the compiler front end instead of C. The interface to the GCC back end will still be in C but that will only be a few thousand lines. The runtime will be in a combination of C and a subset of COBOL. With this approach I think the whole thing will be less than 70,000 lines of code. Quite a bit of the code fromt he first attempt is reusable. Expiriments I have done indicate that LISP programs require only about 10-20% of the lines of code of a comparable C program with almost proportionate productivity improvements and reductions in bugs, and with similar performance. LISP is not just for processing lists; it is a very powerful programming language and good open source implementations exist (eg SBCL, GCL, CMU Lisp). Some of these run on Windows as well as Unix variants. There are a lot of good books, documentation and other training materials about LISP available on the internet. The opportunities I see for people to help will be COBOL Skills: * Test your COBOL programs and submit bug reports. * Work on the some of the runtime routines. Lisp skills * Work on the compiler front end (parser etc). C Skills * Work on the runtime routines. C Skills and GCC Internals skills * Work on the GCC back end interface. As this is a Free Software Foundation project it will be necessary for anyone who makes more than a very small contribution to legally assign the copyright to the FSF, and to get a waiver from their employer or school or college as well. I will issue more updates as I progress, at least on a monthly basis. Regards, Tim Josling On Thu, 2007-11-29 at 10:48 -0500, David A. Cobb wrote: > >> > >> Tom Browder > >> Niceville, Florida > >> USA > >> > Personally, I found the MURACH (publisher) books quite good. "Structured > COBOL ..." is the first title that occurs to me. > > But I'm really jumping in here from excitement at seeing some activity > on the list. The last time I had looked, Sourceforge listed the project > as inactive. This mail sent me back to the happy discovery that work has > restarted. > > So, could someone bring me up to date? And tell me how I can help. > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > SF.Net email is sponsored by: The Future of Linux Business White Paper > from Novell. From the desktop to the data center, Linux is going > mainstream. Let it simplify your IT future. > http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/8857-50307-18918-4 > _______________________________________________ > Cobolforgcc-users mailing list > Cobolforgcc-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cobolforgcc-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: The Future of Linux Business White Paper from Novell. From the desktop to the data center, Linux is going mainstream. Let it simplify your IT future. http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/8857-50307-18918-4 _______________________________________________ Cobolforgcc-users mailing list Cobolforgcc-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cobolforgcc-users
