Re: [open-cobol-list] Proposed addition to OpenCOBOL: an object module generator

[Brian Tiffin]

... And with the rest of the thread upto the note about no gdb COBOL mode. ...

These types of efforts would be greatly appreciated.  The current parser.y is 
a fair beasty, but cleanly implemented so it's not too too horrible to grok.

One of the things I've been (and, the lead developers have taken kicks at this 
as well) is modifying codegen.c to emit  #line nnn "file.cob" so that at 
least gdb Step sould show current source lines.  This is not as easy as it 
sounds.  The system already has source_location tracing but when 1 line of 
COBOL emits zero to n lines of C, the internals of gdb Step get confused and 
start showing back steps and other oddities.

The other issue is that the parsers COBOL name table is not exported to C.  
There is an intermediate translation to b_nnn type names for each COBOL 
working storage element.  So display has issues as well.  Personally I don't 
mind mentally merging the C with the COBOL as there are very nice comments 
and source_location tracer rounds in the generated code, but it would be 
wonderous if someone with some know-how on gdb could assist getting some form 
of object, C trickery or a gbd-mi map created to allow for more human 
friendly debugging.

I started looking into the potential of creating scripts for gdb-mi (or maybe 
even a front-end) that would hide some of the mucky muck from developers and 
make it "look like" a full on source level debug.

I'd love to hear more about what you think we might be able to pull off and if 
you are willing, I'd like to offer whatever technical assistance or grunt 
lift and carry might be needed to move towards this goal.

(Aside:  I've been tweaking  GPS  the GNAT Programming Studio IDE for use with 
OpenCOBOL and Vala and soon ... <insert other embedded systems we now have 
access to as callables from OC core; Guile, Lua, js, ummm, Perl, PHP, S-Lang, 
SQLite etc> and if we could fit this into that, well, yayy team).

Cheers,
Brian

On May 23, 2009 08:53:07 pm Jeff Chimene wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Would there be any interest in adding an object module generator to
> OpenCOBOL?
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------