Jacques: Created page with "Title: BabyCOBOL: The Challenge to Program Generation Tool Developers On one side of the gap we have academic researchers developing new techniques of language processing in..."

2020-02-04T19:00:28Z

Created page with "Title: BabyCOBOL: The Challenge to Program Generation Tool Developers On one side of the gap we have academic researchers developing new techniques of language processing in..."

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Title: BabyCOBOL: The Challenge to Program Generation Tool Developers

On one side of the gap we have academic researchers developing new
techniques of language processing in general and program generation in
particular, and validating them by prototyping tools that typically
work on one particular relatively well-designed language such as Java,
Scala, Scheme or ML, or a subset of such a language. On the other side
of the gap, we have industrial researchers and practitioners of the
same domain, struggling to implement tools that are capable of
processing legacy programming languages such as COBOL, FORTRAN, PL/I,
CLIST and 4GLs. Even those that wish this gap to be bridged,
understand that it is unfair to demand full coverage of monstrously
complex languages like COBOL from academics, and it is equally
unrealistic to expect all freshly developed techniques to be easily
portable to such languages without any help of the researchers. As a
bridge across this chasm, I will present BabyCOBOL: an artificially
created language of deliberately small size, with only a handful of
language features. Yet, each of the features it has, was inherited
from a similar feature from a legacy language such as COBOL, RPG, REXX
or a 4GL, and represents some compiler implementation problem,
well-known among legacy language-supporting tool vendors.

BabyCOBOL is small enough to use as running example or an assignment
in a university course, if the goal is to produce engineers capable of
facing various problems of dealing with legacy languages. It is also
small enough to implement with limited resources within any framework
that is capable of tackling it, and yet demonstrate convincingly how
this framework helps the developer.

WG211/M20Zaytsev - Revision history

Jacques: Created page with "Title: BabyCOBOL: The Challenge to Program Generation Tool Developers On one side of the gap we have academic researchers developing new techniques of language processing in..."