Re: EBNF definition for RPG?

RKRayhawk <rkrayhawk@aol.com> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
> Don't know of one but sense that there is a big opportunity there to
> bring that set of apps across into the inexpensive world of 'the
> desktop' environs.


Forget it.
I have seen this (not) work.
The problem isn't RPG itself (that's easy enough to translate), it's
that IBM defines a slew of new facilities for RPG with every release of
OS/400, and you cannot port those RPG programs unless you find the same
libraries on the PC. I've seen different RPG emulators, and *all* failed
on the library account.
It's unlikely that IBM will ever stabilize the library facilities: it's
one of those things that keep AS/400 customers from migrating to PCs.


> [Oh, you can certainly write a lexer that turns column positions
> into tokens. But the syntax of RPG is so simple that BNF seems
> like overkill. -John]


Yup. Even a parser is overkill. Everything is already encoded into
columns; just dispatch first on the letter in the card type column, then
on the operator name.
Unless, of course, IBM has redefined the syntax in the past 5 years; I
think something in this direction was announced but I happily stopped
working in RPG at that time. (I know of only one language that's worse
than RPG, and that's INTERCAL.)


Regards,
Joachim

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.