Re: [open-cobol-list] GUI for compiler

[Brian Tiffin]

I'm slowly building up the extension for GNAT Programming Studio.  Yes, it has 
a very Ada centric nature, but with a little effort it could be quite the 
little OpenCOBOL IDE.  So far I'm impressed, and have only scratched the 
surface of what this tool could offer in terms of feature integration.  
Especially in terms of getting multi-lingual OpenCOBOL, C, Vala, Guile, 
humming nicely with glib and GTK+ for some very nice GUI and network aware 
OpenCOBOL applications.  And hey, Ada includes COBOL interfacing as part of 
its official specification, so if we do a good enough job, perhaps AdaCore 
will build some of the extension right into a later release of gnat-gps.

I've already got a nice menu for compile and build, start of a highlighter, a 
text completion alias that just requires "program" and Ctrl-O to get a fully 
fleshed out program skeleton, etc...  Still need to work out the best way to 
get the stderr from make to be noticed by the internal editor, for quick fix 
mode, just haven't looked all that closely yet.  I'll look at hooking in 
docgen and document views as well (in a few lines of XML customization).

The gaping hole in all this is still the symbolic debugger.  The best way of 
working out the hooks for gdb is up in the air.  And I think we should target 
efforts at getting hooks for gdb as the debugger of choice.  I don't find 
linking the commented OpenCOBOL/C output and running gdb as-is difficult at 
all, but some may need or want a little more, and that should be worked out.

See opencobol.org GPS posts for details.

Cheers,
Brian

On March 1, 2009 10:51:11 pm David Essex wrote:
> I found this post on the COBOL-IT forum [1], under 'General discussion -
> GUI for compiler'.
>
> It's not an IDE and it is intended for the MSVC port of OC.
> But it looks Wind*ws user friendly and should work on both MinGW and
> Cygw*n.
>
> GolfCat wrote:
> > Please take a look at the new CobShell [2].
> > CobShell is a GUI tool for the COBOL-IT Compiler Suite on the
> > Visual C 2008 Express distribution.
>
> 1) COBOL-IT forum
> http://www.cobol-it.org/forum/
> 2) CobShell
> http://www.bodingh.se/cobol/