[Tiny-cobol-users] A few questions...

[David E. <de...@us...>]

A Jackson Smith wrote on the TC SF forum:

 > 1. Is there an Inline debugger? (meaning at execution time?)
 > 2. Is there Documentation on the following:
 > i. How to debug?

Yes and No.

TC translates COBOL into 32-bit GNU assembler (GAS) and then uses GCC to 
create the binary file (executable, shared library or DLL).

The '-g' command line option will enable the debugger code generation.

There are several debuggers available for GCC, such as GDB the GNU 
interactive debugger.

Unfortunately this part of TC has not been properly maintained,
so debugging only works partially, at best.


 > ii. Which COBOL Verbs have not been implemented at all/which
 > should work?

All of the verbs have been implemented, at least partially.
I think (UN)STRING and EVALUATE are the only two verbs which are not 
fully implemented.

Some of the items that are not implemented, are the REPORT SECTION, 
COMMUNICATION SECTION, DECLARATIVES.

Many things are only partially implemented.


 > iii. How to install cleanly in a Wind*ws Environment?
 > Some of the bits are very unix'y and unfortunately I am not! I got it
 > working but got very confused.

I'm not not aware of any way to install a console application in a 
Wind*ws GUI based environment, cleanly.
Even when then installation is done using a GUI application like INNO setup.

To complicate matters, TC requires MinGW, the GCC compiler for Wind*ws, 
and BDB and PDcureses.


 > 3. What is the recommended way to produce GUI front-ends?
 > If there is none, I have been playing with XBLite and there is an
 > addon called Vixen that works like a VB Painter and can be used
 > like Micro Focus Dialog System.
 > Are there examples/support for call conventions between languages?

Yes, there is support for the C and Pascal (WINAPI) call conventions.

There is limited support in COBOL for pointers and structures, so it is 
best to use the native API language to write GUI front-ends.
Then COBOL (sub)programs can be considered as just another function call.

Same examples can be found in the test.code directories.
A trivial Win32 example can be found in the 'test.code/tgui02' directory.


 > 4. I worked for Micro Focus Technical Support for over 12 years
 > and a further 5 for a training and consultancy company in Germany.
 > Is there any support/testing work that needs to be done?
 > 5. What interest is there for my documentation?

Any help in that department would be appreciated.

There is some limited documentation, which can be found on the TC 
resources web page (1).

Feel free to expand or rewrite it.

1) TinyCOBOL
http://tiny-cobol.sf.net/