[Cobolforgcc-announce] Status of the COBOL For GCC project

[tim <te...@me...>]

Work on the project stopped for a number of years, for good but
uninteresting reasons, but I have recently started work again. 

In fact I left my job recently to work on the project. I took a holiday
first and I'm now working full time on the project. I plan for work on
the project for at least six months and I think that will suffice to get
a substantial part of the work done. 

My plan is to get a minimal subset running and then put it up on
sourceforge, at which point I will be inviting others to help.

Our first attempt produced 80,000 lines of code and I would estimate we
were about 30% of the way there. I have started again with a different
approach using LISP as the main language for the compiler front end
instead of C. The interface to the GCC back end will still be in C but
that will only be a few thousand lines. The runtime will be in a
combination of C and a subset of COBOL. With this approach I think the
whole thing will be less than 70,000 lines of code. Quite a bit of the
code fromt he first attempt is reusable.

Expiriments I have done indicate that LISP programs require only about
10-20% of the lines of code of a comparable C program with almost
proportionate productivity improvements and reductions in bugs, and with
similar performance. LISP is not just for processing lists; it is a very
powerful programming language and good open source implementations exist
(eg SBCL, GCL, CMU Lisp). Some of these run on Windows as well as Unix
variants. There are a lot of good books, documentation and other
training materials about LISP available on the internet.

The opportunities I see for people to help will be

COBOL Skills:
* Test your COBOL programs and submit bug reports.
* Work on the some of the runtime routines.

Lisp skills
* Work on the compiler front end (parser etc).

C Skills
* Work on the runtime routines.

C Skills and GCC Internals skills
* Work on the GCC back end interface.

As this is a Free Software Foundation project it will be necessary for
anyone who makes more than a very small contribution to legally assign
the copyright to the FSF, and to get a waiver from their employer or
school or college as well.

I will issue more updates as I progress, at least on a monthly basis.

Regards,
Tim Josling