Hi Firstly, as an aside, I have to say, about your choice of topic:
A Totally Clueless Newbie Tilting At Windmills parses (using my wetware) as: 1) Totally Clueless => Beginner 2) Newbie => Beginner 3) Tilting At Windmills => Beginner So I think you've coined a triple tautology there!? Well done! But of course it could be parsed by Marpa as well..... As for (shudder) Cobol, hmm, yes, I was a Cobol contractor for 11 years, but protective amnesia, umm, protects me from recalling too many details. Although I still do remember the day a manager came into our office and told us that, due to the economy drive, we could only take 2 pencils at a time from the stationery cabinet. (I swear this is a true story). He must have had a memory issue (too), because he forgot to offer to take a pay cut. Ahh, those were the days.... As for you project, I strongly advise you to forget it, and accept that hand-writing to corresponding Perl is the only way to go. A massive problem IMHO is the part of Cobol where you declare the picture clause of the variables. To Cobol newbies, this is the storage space, decimal place alignment, etc, type of stuff - per variable. This matters because the declarations of 2 variables affect how the results of calculations are effected. Possibly, intermediate values are affect too, but I forget that detail. The pain I predict means I must warn you not to go there. Now, you might think that doing it by hand would involve the same sort of thing, so why not automate it? I still say no. This is a way of saying your brain will, after doing a couple of programs, develop the skill to *effectively*automate it, i.e. get faster and faster. Perhaps with some experience you might return to the Marpa-based approach to handle just the logic (which I discuss next). What I would do is: Start by concentrating on the productivity gain of writing fresh Perl to emulate the logic, /without/ caring about the accuracy of the results. Ie make the Perl embody the spirit of what the Cobol is trying to do. Then, study the representation of the data as declared in the Cobol picture clauses, in order to make the code do exactly the right thing. For example, if it's high-quality code it will follow the rule we did, of only ever performing a section, not just a paragraph. This means you turn the sections, or, at worst, the paras, into Perl subs, as the first step. Then it's back to the logic. Or, just get another job :-(. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "marpa parser" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
