January meeting notes

[Abe Kornelis]

All,

We had a good meeting with Larry Simmons, Dan Greiner,
John Ganci, Don Higgins, and Abe Kornelis.

Dan raised the issue of instructions not always 
assembling correctly and not always recognizing
edge cases correctly. Specifically where instructions
are assembled that will cause a specification exception.

Abe mentioned that the work on the NIST cobol
test suite has been completed in the sense that the
collection seems to be complete and correct.
However, most programs still fail to compile.

The repository with the curated NIST suite is at
https://github.com/z390development/nistcobol85

Abe also mentioned progress with modifying 
comments in the java programs to conform to
the javadoc standard. This is being changed in order
to be able to use the javadoc tool to generate
documentation for the java code. Which is helpful
when trying to find one's way around in the 
rather large java programs that make up z390.

Abe mentioned he's also working to revive
the testcase programs that exist in z390 yet
were never integrated into the regression testing
suite. This is important to detect regressions
at an early stage.

Finally, Abe's working to create a new home
page for the z390 site.

Don remarked he's trying to get back up to 
speed with z390 by running all the test programs.
He's also looking forward to work on instruction
support logic in z390 again.

John explained he's been working on the LOAD
and DELETE support routines in z390. The use
count for loaded programs in z390 is only one byte,
but should be two bytes. Also, the CDE entries
are not  managed properly - they tend to be left
behind as orphaned storage. His latest change 
addresses these issues.

John and Abe to work together to resolve final
issues surrounding these changes in order to
get the Pull Request merged asap.

Dan and Abe to work together to get Dan up to
speed with using github.

Don and Abe to work together to help Don 
get back up to speed and look at the tests program
collection in z390.

Thanks to all who attended the meeting.
Kind regards & happy programming!
Abe
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