COBOL support in GDB

[Robert Dubner <rdubner@symas.com>]

My name is Bob Dubner.  I live in upstate New York, in the United States.
I work for the Symas Corporation, which has an interest in COBOL-based
systems.  For the last several years I have been working along with my
colleagues Marty Herman and Jim Lowden to develop a COBOL front end for
the GCC compiler collection.

 

That front end, with much gratefully received assistance and support from
the GCC community during the incorporation phase, was released back in
March as part of GCC-15.1.

 

So, with GCC now able to compile COBOL, a natural next step is the
capability of debugging COBOL code.

 

About three years ago, we forked binutils-gdb on
https://gitlab.cobolworx.com/COBOLworx/gdb-cobol.  That's where I have
been developing support in GDB for the COBOL language as implemented in
GCC's COBOL front end.  I regularly merge the master branch of
git://sourceware.org/git/binutils-gdb.git into our fork, most recently
today.

 

I have the COBOL-aware debugger actually working.  Somebody who can
navigate the multiple gates of 

 

1) Access to an Ubuntu 22 or 24 system, 

2) A willingness to download and install the leading-edge COBOL compiler
from https://gitlab.cobolworx.com/COBOLworx/gcc-cobol/-/packages, 

3) A matching willingness to download and install the leading-edge
GDB-COBOL debugger from
https://gitlab.cobolworx.com/COBOLworx/gdb-cobol/-/packages

4) Actually caring enough about COBOL to go through steps 1 through 3

 

can then use the resulting installed gcobol compiler to compile a COBOL
program and then use gdb-cobol to debug it.  My intent, so far, is that
GDB users will not be surprised by what ordinary GDB commands do when
debugging a COBOL program.

 

I am writing here because it is my belief that we can at least start
talking about incorporating my cobol_language work into GDB.

 

It involves eight new files in the gdb directory, all named
"cobol-<something>".  There are some changes to code elsewhere in the gdb
subdirectory.

 

I anticipate that there will be a fair amount of polite interaction about
some of my changes that will, nonetheless, come from a place of "Why in
the name of all that is holy did you do THAT??!!"  

 

The answers to those perfectly valid questions will be rooted in two
places.  

 

First, COBOL is weird.  

 

Second, I didn't know any better.  

 

So, I need guidance on how to proceed.  Perhaps I should come up with a
patch that just installs the some of the cobol-xxx files, so that my work
can be evaluated?  I am sure there will be questions, and comments, and
protests that I will have to address.  

 

Or what?

 

Thank you very much for your consideration.

 

Bob Dubner