[open-cobol-list] Re: [Cobolforgcc-devel] COBOL utilities project (was: open-cobol-0.9.6)

[Tim Josling]

David Essex wrote:
> Tim, just a few questions regarding COBOL4GCC.
> 
> How is COBOL4GCC going to deal with large numbers, specifically
> intermediate variables which require 33 digits, according to the COBOL 2002
> draft standard.
> 

David Sadler is working on an implementation of Knuth's algorithms. I looked
at gmp and had the same issue of size. Also the use of dynamically allocated
storage would be a pain to manage, especially in the GCC environment.

> How is COBOL4GCC going to deal with indexed files ? Will it also be using DB ?
> 

Probably. I will probably reuse whatever you guys are doing. Maybe later on we
might do a custom piece but I think db is good enough to start.

> The first project will probably be the NIST test suite. Currently there are
> two versions, one for TC and one for OC. Do you have any comments
> suggestions on this ?
> 

I don't know enough to comment. I thought the NIST was supposed to be self
extracting, so there should not be an issue. Just shows how much I don't know
about this, I guess.

>  ..
> David Essex
> 

Regards,
Tim Josling