11/26/1999 The Tiny Cobol Project is with new home. Please save
tiny-cobol.sourceforge.net in
your bookmarks. This site will stay like it is now. When I get some time to
spare (not very often), I will change this into an information area with
implementation details and notes on lex/yacc programming.
I'm committed to teach what I already know, but please don't push me too much :)
11/22/1999 These are good news: we are moving to a better server, with CVS,
ftp and http, and soon a new mailing list. The new site, sponsored by VA, is
SourceForge. At least, we will not see any advertisements at the top of our
window :)
Other news are we have another snapshot. Things are going really fast.
11/19/1999 Andrew is making progress at the i/o routines. I have been
working with arrays of several dimensions (occurs within occurs). Get the
newest snapshot:
rpcobol-991119.tar.gz
11/15/1999 Now we have "perform .. var times" and "perform ... varying
var from init by incr until condition". Get your snapshot at
rpcobol-991115.tar.gz.
11/11/1999 David and Rildo have been working lately and we have
a new release. The main changes are "indexed by" and "var of parent of..."
working:
rpcobol-991111a.tar.gz.
11/05/1999 Some redesign of the scanner/parser to avoid problems at
the identification (yes, there were problems even there!). Snapshot is
rpcobol-991105.tar.gz.
10/30/1999 Now the compiler can use variables with filenames. I have to
make many changes to do this. The newest snapshot is
rpcobol-991030c.tar.gz.
10/30/1999 Yet another snapshot. Now I have turned its stack cleaning-up
more automatic, thus less error-prone. I was becoming tired of fixing
stack miscalculation at those "addl $n,%%esp" instructions
(it's not nice).
10/30/1999 Merged with Andrew mods, with sort routines. Please see download
section below. There is also libdb in rpm format for RedHat and derived distro
users.
10/29/1999 More file modes working. Try t06 directory for testing examples.
Current release is
rpcobol-991029.tar.gz.
I have also made available libdb source and binaries
for a libc5 system. The binaries are at PORT/linux in the distribution.
What is Tiny Cobol?
Linux need a free (under GPL license) Cobol compiler because of the incountable
commercial applications written in this language.
I found in my spare parts box
an old cobol compiler, that could be the skeleton of such project. It was very
tiny, done for another environment, and very limited¸ so it have to be
rewritten for accomplish the job. Well, now we're doing this. It will be freely
available, based only in free tools.
Which features will it have?
This is only a sketch (or braindump, if you prefer).
generate output in plain C
interface to gdbm and sql databases. In fact, we plan to make gdbm our
default indexing library.
GUI (probably with tcl/tk).
support standards, ANS-85.
some kind of debugging capability. The original compiler featured a
prolog-based debugger, but is very difficult to port it to Unix. Better if
we start from scratch.
What is lacking?
We just started this project. Almost everything is lacking.
But there is some progress as yet. The compiler is generating x86 assembly
code as the original (for MsDosTM) program. Now we have to make it
generate C code and do the most of the runtime library.
What can I do to help?
If you is a Cobol programmer, you can send us the features (for now ANS-74)
missing, so we can implement it. Cobol ANS-85 compatibility will be left for
the near future.
If you are a compiler tools programmer, you can help as well, implementing
what's missing. For the C programmers, there are plenty of things to be done.
If you are a technical writer, will need one for writing the documentation.
At last (but not at least), we need beta-testers.
You can subscribe to our (development)
mailing list.
Downloads, please!
Our runtime depends on libdb. If you don't have it already installed
on your system, please take this
local copy (libdb) or look at
Metalab. If you have a RedHat,
TurboLinux, Caldera, SuSE or any other rpm-based system, you may want to take
this libdb in rpm format (local copy).
Here are the original sources. Don't compile in
Linux, don't run, are messy. Some garbage inside!
This is the cobol to assembly compiler. It
works with Linux, but the code generated is nonsense yet. If you want just to
study the code, it's suitable. For nothing more.
