Re: COBOL support in GDB

[Guinevere Larsen via Gdb <gdb@sourceware.org>]

Hi.

That is not a very welcoming message to read as the second message Bob 
ever received in this community. If you are just genuinely surprised 
that someone is working with COBOL (or any other technology for that 
matter), I encourage you to be a little more careful with your wording, 
like "wow, I didn't know it was still this important" or "that is very 
surprising, but good luck".

The way your email is worded, it sounds rather dismissive of his efforts 
to add support, which makes the GDB community seem unapproachable.

-- 
Cheers,
Guinevere Larsen
It/she


On 8/27/25 2:42 PM, Thomas Dineen via Gdb wrote:
> COBOL you must be kidding!
>
>
>
> On 8/20/2025 5:17 PM, Robert Dubner wrote:
>> 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
>>
>