On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 17:31:54 -0500
Pietro Monteiro <[email protected]> wrote:
> CC'ing COBOL maintainers for guidance.
Thank you for roping^W looping us in.
The changes to frontends.html and criteria.html look correct to me.
The ISO standard refers to COBOL, all uppercase:
Information technology ?
Programming languages, their
environments and system software
interfaces ? Programming language
COBOL
For that reason, I think the codingconventions.html patch is incorrect:
> -- >8 --
> Following ISO/IEC 1989:2023 "Information technology ? Programming
> languages, their environments and system software interfaces ?
> Programming language COBOL"
>
> Signed-off-by: Pietro Monteiro <[email protected]>
> ---
> htdocs/codingconventions.html | 5 +++++
> htdocs/frontends.html | 2 +-
> htdocs/gcc-16/criteria.html | 2 +-
> 3 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/htdocs/codingconventions.html
> b/htdocs/codingconventions.html index c2e9e5e2..5a6bc1f0 100644
> --- a/htdocs/codingconventions.html
> +++ b/htdocs/codingconventions.html
> @@ -432,6 +432,11 @@ and code. The following table lists some simple
> cases:</p> <td>"bugfix" or "bug-fix"</td>
> <td>"bugfix" isn't a word</td>
> </tr>
> + <tr>
> + <td>"COBOL"</td>
> + <td>"Cobol" or "cobol"</td>
> + <td></td>
> + </tr>
> <tr>
> <td>"ColdFire"</td>
> <td>"coldfire" or "Coldfire"</td>
IMO because the name of the language is COBOL, the above should include
only "COBOL". We don't want those writing documentation or
translations to be seduced into using, say, "Cobol" for aesthetic
reasons, unaware of the official designation.
The only reason I can see to use "Cobol" or "cobol" are strictly
related to GCC. For example, the configure option
--enable-lanaguages=cobol
requires the lowercase designation. And some of parts of gcc designate
the FE as "[Cc]obol", cf. gcc/cobol/lang.opt.
But that's a subtlety. It seems like a lot of information to include
in a list of "simple cases" of conventions.
If only HTML had footnotes....
--jkl
