Am 25.10.2021 um 05:00 schrieb Bruce Axtens:
G'day everyone Just letting you know that I've created a gnu-cobol track on Exercism.org .
It would be useful to rename/restart as either "gnucobol" (if you need the actual implementation in) or COBOL (or cobol) otherwise [just check: is there clang and gcc or only "C"].
As I get going on this I have some questions: 1. Should I insist on free-format or standard format for students' code?
No. If you need to insist on one then use fixed-form reference-format as many existing tools (like official SQL preprocessors) can only handle fixed-form and have at least 1 exercise in free-form reference-format and another for fixed-form with COBOL 2002 adjustments (inline comments with *>, compiler directives >>, literal continuation indicator as "a"- " string; concatenation expression with &).
2. Is there are preferred unit test framework? I've discovered three.
No. Evaluate the ones you see and then do a choice. It is likely useful for the mailing list to send your evaluation back to the list and if you did not come to a final result ask for comments.
Most of the other languages have a minimum of 20 exercises before moving off into more creative tasks. I could do with some suggestions re tasks that introduce the student to the data processing capabilities of COBOL.
You may want to have a look what topics are handled in the following tutorial: https://sourceforge.net/p/gnucobol/contrib/HEAD/tree/trunk/samples/worldcities/ Its license allows full inclusion everywhere but would make a result be under GPL, so if you include bigger portions of it instead of the topics your tutorials may need the same license (otherwise I'd still suggest to add an explicit license, if not otherwise possible as a comment within the tutorial's code, and would suggest using either the GNU FDL or LGPL or Public Domain). There is another one that I've heard good things about: http://www.csis.ul.ie/cobol/ but this has a restricted license so ensure you don't copy anything from it.
Simply re-expressing all the VB.NET (for example) exercises in COBOL seems a bit pointless.
If it is done well it may still be quite useful, but you'll likely add at least the different file ORGANISATIONs in COBOL.
Kind regards, Bruce.
Thank you for reaching out and for giving a different audience of people a chance to get to know COBOL. Simon
