November meeting notes

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Abe Kornelis

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Nov 5, 2025, 5:23:38 PMNov 5

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All,

we just had our November meeting.

John Ganci, Larry Simmons, and I were present.

We discussed progress on validating the copy
of the NIST cobol test suite that we have.
Abe is working on fixing the cases where the
zCobol compiler breaks instead of issuing a
proper error message. Purpose is to get to the
point where we can conclude that the set of
files/members is complete and usable.

Anthony has been working on a port of the old
MVS Cobol compiler, but status is currently
unknown. If/when that port progresses, we'll
want to run it against the NIST test suite to
validate its operation.

We also discussed javadoc comments and
source code formatting. Fixing the javadoc
comments is a work in progress. The code
formatting, across our entire codebase, is
not entirely consistent. John and Abe both
use a non-standard layout, but different from
one another. Harmonisation of style would be
nice, we have not yet decided which style to
adopt throughout. Nor how to get all the
changes done and reviewed.

John mentioned he's been looking into the
load/delete logic and the z390 equivalent
of content management. There are some
issues in there, relating to deleting a module
and then loading it again.

John also brought up that free space is
managed using a linked list that has its
data inside the free area it manages.
z390 distinguishes between 24-bit and
31-bit by maintaining separate free area
chains. But there is no separate allocation
of storage for z390 internal use. This renders
the system vulnerable. John wants to look
into a solution to pre-allocate a part of storage
for use by the z390 system and protect that
storage from being overwritten by user code.

Anthony has suggested we should have github
send out an automated message whenever
we create a new distribution. We decided not
to do this - we prefer to create our communications
manually so we can provide more relevant content.

Finally, we decided to create a new distribution
to finalise some fixes to the collection of BAT
procedures.