[gnu-soc] GSOC 2023 project ideas for GnuCOBOL

[Simon Sobisch]

Summary:
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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.
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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