Friday, February 13, 2009

“COBOL the Barbarian: Multi-Language .NET Snippet Compiler” – WPF Application with COBOL as the code behind…

CodePlex - COBOL the Barbarian: Multi-Language .NET Snippet Compiler

Project Description
COBOL the Barbarian is a multi-language .NET snippet compiler. The Barbarian is written in COBOL, and speaks C#. Support for additional .NET languages will be added in the near future.

History
The Barbarian has overthrown Add One Snippy, which was a straight port to COBOL of the C# code for Jon Skeet's Snippy. FxCop demanded a strong name for the assembly. The Gonzo COBOL Cooperative responded by unleashing COBOL the Barbarian.

Status: Alpha, Version 0.0.1.0
2009-02-12: The Barbarian does compile C#, but remains mute, and the Options menu still doesn't load dynamically. These issues will be addressed when possible. The clue to RoutedEventHandlers may lie in the generated files.

Development Tools
The development team uses the free Micro Focus NetExpress Personal Edition add-in for Visual Studio 2008. …” [Project Description Leach Level:90%]

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The title caught my eye, but the code and implementation is what kept me.

How cool is it that this is a WPF app being written in COBOL? IHMO, pretty cool… (I don’t know COBOL, but I still think this is pretty cool in a geeky kind of way  ;)

Got to love .Net!  :)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Greg,

Thanks for mentioning the Barbarian. He finally captures console output -- which means that feature parity with the C# original has been achieved.

I started learning COBOL.NET three weeks ago. The really hard part on this project has been WPF!

I hope to see a few billion lines of object oriented COBOL written this year by new COBOL developers. The 50th anniversary of COBOL falls on September 18, 2009.

Time spent hacking COBOL.NET is never wasted. It's all about the framework.

When time allows, I'm going to try to write something in COBOL for the Windows cloud. But first I have to add support for compiling a few more .NET languages -- and write the Reflector add-in.

Best,

- Matt Fisher