[antlr-interest] RES: RES: COBOL grammar

[Nilo Roberto C Paim]

Hi, Ron.

Glad to say that I'm the maintainer of TinyCobol. 

What I'm trying to do here is write a new version of it, using Antlr. In
this new version, I want to implement a lot of things that does not exists
today, like native GUI and native access to RDBMS in general. Also, I'm
going to generate 'executables' for Java JVM and for .Net CIL. Current
TinyCobol generates assembly code for 32 bits only, and I think this is a
big limitation for it now.

But let's go to the real problem...

A command in Cobol may or may be not terminated by '.'. All sequence of
commands terminated by only one '.' are a block. A sample of this are the
commands in the 'then' or the 'else' part of an 'IF' command. In this case,
the first '.' found on the end of some command terminates not only the
command, but the 'IF' command as a whole.

Additionally, a '.' must be the last token between paragraphs. Alias, the
command sequence on a paragraph needs only the final '.', if I want.

There is no way I could say if a '.' belongs to the preceding command or if
it enclosing the current paragraph, except by the fact that, if the
following token is a section name or a new paragraph, it quits the current
paragraph; else it quits a block.

Maybe I'm just missing the way to say that to Antlr. As I've already said,
I'm a newbie.

Thanks for interest and sorry the poor English. I'm Portuguese native
speaker.

Nilo - Brazil

-----Mensagem original-----
De: antlr-interest-bounces at antlr.org
[mailto:antlr-interest-bounces at antlr.org] Em nome de Ron Burk
Enviada em: segunda-feira, 11 de julho de 2011 19:24
Cc: antlr-interest at antlr.org
Assunto: Re: [antlr-interest] RES: COBOL grammar

> What else am I missing?

Are you certain you mean the '.' at the end of the command
to be optional? An initial scan seems to indicate only one
optional '.' in the tinyCobol grammar, in procedure declarations.

Likewise, an uneducated glance at another COBOL grammar:
    http://www.cs.vu.nl/grammarware/browsable/cobol/#EBNF
seemed to indicate the "." is rarely optional.

Or put another way, at the end of a command, what are
the precise rules for deciding whether a '.' belongs to
the current command or to the enclosing paragraph?
If you can state an unambiguous rule for making that decision,
you can probably force ANTLR to do it.

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