[Info-vax] VMS Cobol - GnuCOBOL

[Scott Dorsey]

Johnny Billquist  <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>All very true. But that does not change the fact that when you point a 
>debugger at it, it will trace the binary back to C, not Cobol, unless 
>you extend the debugger to do the reversing of the C to the original 
>Cobol code. And unless you do some tricks to the C compiler, a debugger 
>don't even have a way to know that it wasn't originally C code.

Doesn't gnucobol do that?  I thought gdb did that just fine.

The original g77 used the Bell Labs f2c translator in front of gcc and
it often didn't work very well and debugging was occasionally an adventure
but it was better than you'd ever expect.  Not that I was not delighted when
the natrive gfortran compiler finally came out.

>But it is the same kind of problems all those other languages also have, 
>and in fact even native compiled languages. After all, the debugger only 
>sees the machine code, and hopefully a bunch of symbols and other 
>meta-data the compiler left behind.

When you have a precompiler and a compiler then you have twice as many
places for bugs to exist.
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."