Subj : Re: COBOL for Beginners
To   : Dumas Walker
From : smartyhall
Date : Sat Dec 07 2019 04:17 am

  Re: Re: COBOL for Beginners
  By: Dumas Walker to POINDEXTER FORTRAN on Fri Dec 06 2019 06:17 pm

 > > I never saw a COBOL compiler, don't know if it was because of demand or
 > > hardware requirements - trying to think about the amount of work to get
 > > from COBOL to X86 assembly boggles the mind.
 >
 > There was not a free one I know of, but IBM/MicroFocus had one.  I bought a
 > copy several years ago.  IIRC, it would run on a 386.  Not sure if it would
 > run on less of a machine than that.
 >
 > There are free ones now, for linux at least.  I believe what they actually
 > do is convert the COBOL source to another language and then compile it from
 > there.
 >
Transpilers often seem like the Great White Whale of computer science. It's so tempting to go down the path of...

If I just write a transpiler that turns this into an intermediate language that is more simple and elegant, I can easily write a compiler that handles that efficiently. Then, I can just advance that compiler and apply it to anything else I encounter in the future, just by writing a simple transpiler. I mean, what's so hard about BNF grammars and trans-language transformations?

:-D
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