Re: C-preprocessor for COBOL?

From: Herwig Huener & Josella Simone Playton (webmaster_at_Josella-Simone-Playton.de)
Date: 07/07/04 

Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2004 12:22:45 +0200

2004-07-07 12:12:12 MESZ

Arnold Trembley wrote:

> ...

> Just for playing around, I wrote an HLASM macro to generate a skeleton
> COBOL batch program with variable options for including copybooks,
> record length, program name, et cetera. It was fun, but I am NO expert
> on HLASM macro coding.

I remember another "misuse" of a Unix-Tool for COBOL.

Some time ago, I worked on the conditional compilation
for the new COBOL-standard. There, I needed
test-programs - huge testprograms with intricate nested
levels of conditional compilation which should present
a real challenge for our COBOL-compiler.

No one can write a test-program of, say, 10000 lines
and have it right the first time.

So what I did is I wrote a bash-script which generates
all of the COBOL-testprogram: the expressions within the
directives, the thousands of lines such as

        display "this must not be compiled" upon tv.
        add 1 to error-counter.

and so on.

This approach worked well - I learned more bash than
COBOL that way.

This task was easy. Not so easy is another thing which
we considered ages ago, in the Ada-compiler-projekt:
Make a Pseudo-Random-Number-generator and have the
random numbers select language elements and their
composition in order to create great test-programs
for a compiler. I do not yet have an easy
script-solution for this - it might require a hell lot
of time to do this.

Herwig 

-- 
Herwig Huener   http://www.quantenrente.de             +49
Josella Simone  http://www.Josella-Simone-Playton.de  8095
Playton         webmaster!@!Herwig-Huener.de          2230
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