| Chuck Stevens 2006-05-24, 9:55 pm |
| .... And WG4 and J4 are watching the "Grammarware" research as it applies to
COBOL syntax (and the COBOL standard) that's being done at Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam ... One of the things I hope might come out of that
is a better (and more accepted) way of expressing the syntax diagrams,
another is the discovery of errors in the current diagrams that an automated
notation-translation process might make more obvious in a different
notation, or even choke on.
-Chuck Stevens
"William M. Klein" <wmklein@nospam.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:ze4dg.46743$bL2.29466@fe02.news.easynews.com...
> "Chuck Stevens" <charles.stevens@unisys.com> wrote in message
> news:e51rlq$10r6$1@si05.rsvl.unisys.com...
> <snippage>
>
> It might be worth mentioning that during the development of the
> (eventually) '02 Standard, there was a reasonable amount of discussion of
> TRYING to change to
>
> A) A "BNF" grammer
> and/or
> B) Any other "formalized" programming language grammer (recognized by ISO
> or others)
>
> It was thought (and I certainly agreeed with this) that the "project" of
> CORRECTLY converting the current format to such a grammer would not just
> be resource-intensive (VERY) but also be incredibly "error-prone".
>
> At the time that I was still a Micro Focus rep on X3J4 (and CCC) Ann
> Wallace (later Bennett) and I would "joke" about the fact that we could
> "randomly" pick a page in the '85 Standard and find SOME error (or
> contradition) in it. Although "fixing" all of these by going to a *NEW*
> "foramlized" language grammar might be "nice" it would have broken many,
> MANY programs and implementations. Instead, via the interpretation and
> revisionprocess (as slow as it is/was), all changes (that we did make) in
> "wordy definitions" were INTENTIONAL and where they intentionally
> introduced changes, such were documented.
>
> It may (or may not) be worth noting that the COBOL Standard has used the
> same "descriptive methodology" since 1960 (or so) while programming
> language "theory" has changed dramatically.
>
> If we could only start over "fresh" .... (who knows what we would have)
>
> --
> Bill Klein
> wmklein <at> ix.netcom.com>
>
|