Good sirs,
I bring tidings of an ancient tongue. You may perhaps know that COBOL
became one of the GCC languages when gcc 15 was released last year. As
a service to our users and the community, I suggest adding variables
for the convenience of building with make. Not to keep you in suspense:
COBC (patterned on CC) for the COBOL compiler
COBFLAGS (patterned on CFLAGS) for the options passed to the
compiler.
As a default value for COBC, I suggest "gcobol".
Rationale for "gcobol".
Naming things, as we all know, is one of the two hard things in
computer science. But let us try. COBOL compilers go by many names:
GCC: gcobol
GNU: cobc
Fujitsu: cobol, cobol64
MicroFocus (now Rocket): cob, cobol
IBM: cob2
We chose "gcobol" because GNU [compiler collection] COBOL. If the user
or packager opts to install it as "cobol" or something else, as gawk
becomes awk, that's their prerogative.
We specifically did not choose the name "cobc" so as not to confuse
users. We anticipate some users will want both compilers, and the two
are very different. GnuCOBOL cobc by default produces a shared object;
gcobol like other GCC compilers defaults to produce an executable.
Humbly submitted,
--jkl
