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From: | Patrick |
Subject: | Re: [open-cobol-list] X86_64 branch ? |
Date: | Mon, 24 Feb 2014 14:27:27 -0500 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20131103 Icedove/17.0.10 |
I asked Joe's permission to respond to
his email to the list as well. I think his perspectives will
benefit all.
Hi Joe Thanks for answering my post. So maybe I shouldn't have framed this as mainframe vs desktop. There are many Unixes. A better way perhaps should have been Desktop vs other hardware. About the standards thing... I have heard others say this too, so adding non standard stuff to the core would like spark a holy war. My main concern with GNUcobol is that there are hardly any libraries and what's worse is that there are very limited mechanisms to even build a library. How likely is it that someone would be able to generate a new codebase that is deployed as a TUI and still charge decent money for it? My main focus is not supporting old code so that a company can limp along with it for a few more years, I love Cobol and I want to write new code. As-is, it is not presentable in my industry and is not financially viable for commercial work. If anything that needs to be added, needs to be in the standard first then the project is going to be severely stunted, that is, "IF", the main mechanism that code sharing takes place is contributions to the core language itself. Library code on the other hand can be used or not used and there is nothing to war over. I have all sorts of half-baked ideas and I am throwing most of them in the garbage myself as I learn more but some may have value and I will post them in separate threads to keep this one tidy though. I would also like to mention that I can't even prototype a half-baked idea with the current codebase, it's overwhelming for me. There are lots of features in the standard that are not implemented and we have also moved outside the standard before with the level 66 constant and we haven't yet talked about expanding test harnesses or debugging existing code. If the codebase was easier to manage, more people could contribute and the project would be more a viable alternative to microfocus. The actual number of lines of code is not that much but it's scary to touch it when it's so cross architecture. Finally, if no one is posting to the list, that doesn't mean that no one is gaining benefit from the project but if more people could contribute, we might have more posts and more ideas would emerge. -Patrick On 24/02/14 12:35 PM, Ron Norman wrote:
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