October meeting Notes

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Abe Kornelis

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Oct 8, 2025, 5:30:51 PMOct 8

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All,

we just finished our October meeting.

John Ganci, Larry Simmons, and Abe were present.

We discussed the status of Cobol in z390:

- Abe is working to make zCobol handle the NIST test suite.
That is: he's trying to get zCobol to not break on any
of the NIST sources. Having errors from the compiles is okay.

- Anthony has created a separate repository for the NIST
sources. But that repo is as good as empty.
Will need to ask Anthony how he wants to proceed with this.

- Anthony is/was working on a port of the MVS 3.8 Cobol
compiler. Status unknown.

Then we discussed coding style issues:

- Abe is changing comments to get rid of all the javadoc
warnings.

- John would like to see the indentation of sources
standardised. And also to replace tabs with spaces.

- We agreed to keep these two efforts separate.

We briefly discussed optable support:

- optable for z17 is now defined, but logic to assemble
or emulate any of the new instructions is still lacking.

- A series of constants has been defined for each
architecture level from 360-20 through z17.
Anthony has urged to replace these constants with
an enum. Abe is planning to look into this when time
permits.

Next we went over the changes in progress:

- John has a fix for Issue #662, Abe to review the
changes starting tomorrow.

- Bob has been working on a floating point issue.
He was planning to involve Don, but current status
is unknown.

- We decided it's time we create a new distribution
of z390. But none of us knows how the process works
to create a new release. We decided to:
a) check the documentation
b) ask Anthony to show us how he goes about
creating a release.

John informed us about his work to fix the CDE use
count, which is a halfword in MVS, but z390 uses
only one byte to hold the count. Also, MVS abends
when the count exceeds 32767, but z390 stays put
at 255 without abending. There were more issues,
it's quite a can of worms.

Larry asked us to provide a demo of building z390
from source. Abe promised to set up a meeting for
next week to show how to:
- create a fork (=private working copy) of the repository
- create a clone (=local copy of fork) on your machine
- build the z390 product

Abe brought up that the z390.org site is rather outdated.
He's considering a makeover of the site.
Don't hold your breath - will take quite a while.
John suggested checking the z390.info site and reuse
what's usable from both sites.

Next meeting: Wednesday, November 5th, late evening
in Europe, afternoon in the Americas, and Thursday,
November 6th in Australia. Meeting invite will be sent
roughly three weeks in advance.