[Info-vax] VMS Cobol - GnuCOBOL

[Denys Beauchemin]

On Monday, February 27, 2023 at 7:11:36 PM UTC-6, Robert A. Brooks wrote:
> On 2/27/2023 6:35 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote: 
> 
> > But isn't that the case for all VMS compilers? I know 
> > I use /DEB/NOOP for both Fortran, Pascal and C when I want 
> > to debug.
> Reagan may weigh in here, but I'm pretty sure that DEC suggested using 
> /DEBUG/NOOP when using the debugger for any language with an optimizer back in 
> the 80's; if so, then that's been a pretty consistent message. 
> 
> -- 
> 
> --- Rob
Speaking of debuggers.

I'm not clear on how you can actually debug a gnucobol program, since it's C in reality.

With NETCOBOL, as an example, debugging on Linux with gdb is much enhanced with our gdb extensions.  When you're debugging across frames, and you have COBOL type variables to examine or modify, it helps to be able to see your COBOL code and ask to see the variables in the sometimes extensive COBOL structures; throw in an OCCURS x TIMES or more and it's a challenge.  It's nice to be able to display the values as COBOL uses them.

Some customers really like to reuse coblib files and the names are the same across multiple structures.  GDB doesn't know COBOL "var1 of struct1 of level1 var".  But our extensions do.