Well, the term is borderline rude: about poking around where maybe you
should not be. In the context of my work on IPSCOBOL, it
was what Roger Moore meant in attempting to break our
shiny, new compiler, preferably using reproducible means.
Today, it's generally called unit testing, including
blackbox and white-box testing.
My testing revealed several code faults, but not many, in the compiler.
Roger's careful design of the code generator kept most of
them out of generated code, except for a few edge conditions.
BTW, IPSCOBOL was a superb compiler. It would compile huge
(i.e., normal-sized) COBOL programs in a few seconds, while
the IBM mainframe compiler would take a half hour or more to do
the same job. Also, IPSCOBOL error messages were deluxe.
E.g., if you tried to read from a closed file, the IBM compiler
would give you a core dump with about a box of paper for your
troubles, from which you could (eventually) deduce what had
gone wrong. Our compiler would issue a terse error message,
along the lines of: "Attempt to read from closed file: foo".
Bob
On 2020-04-06 4:33 p.m., 'Jim Russell' via Chat wrote:
Interesting, thanks. What is brown-thumbing?
On Apr 6, 2020, at 4:04 PM, Devon McCormick <[email protected]> wrote:
brown-thumbing the IPSCOBOL compiler,
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Robert Bernecky
Snake Island Research Inc
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