Re: [gnu-soc] GSOC 2023 project ideas for GnuCOBOL

[Jose E. Marchesi]

Hi Simon.

Can I please have the information as requested, i.e. for each idea, I
need a title (one short statement), a description, a list of skills and
a contact address.

In particular, I'm lacking the idea titles (short statements) in what
you sent.  All of the four ideas (particularly the 4) would benefit from
a little more description.  Please keep in mind that this is read by
people who may not have previous experience to the domain.

Thanks!

> Summary:
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> GnuCOBOL is a free, modern COBOL compiler. It implements a substantial
> part of the COBOL 85, X/Open COBOL and newer ISO COBOL standards
> (2002, 2014, 2023), as well as many extensions included in other COBOL
> compilers (IBM COBOL, MicroFocus COBOL, ACUCOBOL-GT and others).
>
> GnuCOBOL translates COBOL into C and internally compiles the
> translated code using a native C compiler, therefore works on nearly
> every platform.
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Url:                 https://www.gnu.org/software/gnucobol/
> Address for contact: gnucobol-dev@gnu.org
>
> Project Ideas:
>
> 1 compiler building: rewrite the "listing" code so that it is done in
> the parser/lexer (GnuCOBOL currently process the code nearly twice if
> this is requested, using different code, so the result is sometimes
> different and obviously that isn't well in general) - the output
> format and tests are already there (may change where useful)
>
> 2 compiler building: modernize error handling with the goal that
> user-visible diagnostic showing the problematic code along to the
> diagnostic "similar to current GCC", furthermore an option to output
> in xml/json would be nice
>
> 3 compiler and runtime: add handling for source-code in different
> encodings than the "target" (for example as ISO-8859-15, with the
> target of UTF-8) and conversion for data between encodings, for
> example (extended ASCII encodings to UTF-16/UTF32<->UTF8 and vice
> versa)
>
> 4 (mostly) runtime: extending screenio (currently curses-based) to
> allow use of web-clients
>
> Skills necessary to do the work:
>
> 1-4  C
> 1+2  bison/flex
> 3    iconv
> 4    web frontends and experience to couple those with C backends,
>      ideally without the need for an additional web-server